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VC ’ s corner and in getting our learners ready for a technology-rich future .
We actually believe that industry partners will come to work with us because they too know that their success will hinge on some universities being able to prepare the human capital that will make that technology work in their business , and in their government , and in whatever other pursuit they are interested in .
To prepare people for a productive and successful future , we need to equip them with technology understanding and with the capacity to work alongside machines and build a better world . It is going to be made somewhat harder with the cluster funding , but that is assuming that we continue to operate on the logic that the government should be funding all of what we do .
I happen to believe in co-creation . I believe government eventually will come to see that the co-creation with university starts not at the end with what happens to graduates , but at the beginning with asking what sort of talents we need to develop for a better society .
Now if that is the predicament and industries are aware that their business is at risk if they don ’ t have the right talent , I believe they will come and invest , not necessarily their money , but certainly their time and their energy in working with us at developing the best curriculum to get those graduates to have the right skills when they finish .
Swinburne is going to have a very specific type of course architecture where no student will graduate who hasn ’ t had a work experience somewhere . And so industry will have to come to the party for that . We will have to get our alums to take a learner under their wings . Our alumni will be part of our teaching cohort , if you like .
We will build an industry academy where people who are professionals , who have done things and learned things , will come and share their experience with students . We will have an education academy , where people who are really at the leading edge of innovation will help us put those modules of learning into a format that can then be distributed in a multi-channel kind of logic .
So on campus for some students , online for some other students , in small micro-credential form for the professional markets . Indeed , possibly with modules that would actually go well with partners overseas . It ’ s about the leveraging of our digital assets and those digital assets can be a co-investment where we harvest the knowledge and the experience that comes from industry , and we mix it up in such a way that the talent that industry needs is actually grown together from the first day a student enrols .
Are you committing Swinburne and yourself to become more differentiated through those partnerships in the current circumstances ? Completely . The way we ’ re going to get out of the peloton is that we ’ re going to take the road less travelled , because we feel that road actually leads to a different destination , which is the building of human capital as a co-creation exercise with partners such as industry , but also government .
Imagine , for instance , the challenge of what a state like Victoria is facing in relation to the aptitude of its teaching cohort . Teachers who thought that all they needed to do was to be good at geography or good at language or whatever , all of a sudden found themselves sitting , as I am now , in front of their computer talking to their students who are at home as well .
Most of them would not have seen digital literacy as being something that they needed to have in order to be good teachers . Now the government is facing the huge need to up-skill a whole cohort of people who actually define their job description in a completely different way .
Who are they going to call upon to do this ? Well , I would think Swinburne would be the right place to start , because a university that is dedicated to the development of human capital for a technology-rich future is the university that can be the partner of choice for a government when digital literacy is a challenge in a particular profession .
Imagine the world of nursing in the future . Nurses have been , I think , educated over time for their empathy , their capacity to care for patients . All of that stuff is fine . Except now the bed of the patient is going to be surrounded by all kinds of machinery . There will be all kind of diagnostic tools . The internet of things is going to transform the medical field . We have a whole cohort of nurses out there that will need to be equally brought up in terms of digital capability .
To me there ’ s no point in being in a top 200 in the world as a university , but being
The risk of doing nothing is greater than the risk of trying something and not succeeding , which is quite liberating .
in a top 100 in tech and STEM makes a lot of sense , because that ’ s a message that is obviously going to resonate with the kind of courses , programs , researchers and students that we would want to gather in our community , in our ecosystem .
Is the strategy that you ’ ll pursue in terms of your courses and your partnerships going to play out in the way that you ’ ll strategise research at Swinburne ? I think it will . In many ways differentiation means discrimination as well . You then have to focus your investment and your activity on a few areas of excellence as opposed to trying to let all the boats rise , if you like .
It is going to be about coalescing areas of excellence where we can really increase the gravity pool so that we will attract more talent . And we can do this , certainly , in terms of astrophysics and space . We already have very heavy weights that can attract more talent and we can be a credible partner for universities around the world , but also for attracting the highest calibre of students because , in those areas , we definitely lead and shine .
How will you develop the strategy across the wider university community and roll that out in Swinburne in the coming months ? Had I come a year before I would have had to make the case for change . Swinburne was a very successful university . People were comfortable in saying that they had a university that ticks quite a number of boxes .
What the pandemic has done is to really jolt everybody in thinking . “ What ’ s the future like ?” And so , in some ways , we ’ re in a situation where the risk of doing nothing is greater than the risk of trying something and not succeeding , which is quite liberating .
That ’ s the thing about universities . They ’ re full of really smart people . So you can always trust the community to really think clearly and carefully about the various challenges that you put in front of them . And I could not be more pleased with the kind of response that I ’ ve had . ■
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