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SA uni holds jam session
By Antonia Maiolo
The University of South Australia is staging one of the biggest conversations about its future this month. The only difference is that conversation will take place online.
On May 29-30, the university will launch a“ unijam”, bringing together thousands of participants – students, alumni and staff – to generate ideas for the future planning of the university.
“ It is the people on the ground – the students, the research fellows, the professional staff, the business leaders who have practical perspectives about what works well and where things can improve,” University of South Australia vice-chancellor, professor David Lloyd, said.
Over two days, participants can provide insight through online discussion forums and polls which will be supported by an IBM platform.
Lloyd said this is the first time a university has ever attempted an IBM Jam to boost engagement and innovation with students who will have the opportunity to personally chat with senior leaders and international strategists.
“ It is just one example of how we can use technology innovatively to build engaged communities and new ideas that make sense in their community context,” Lloyd said. The online discussions will be organised in themes allowing participants to log into the areas most important to them. At the end of the unijam, the ideas, polls and conversations will be analysed and fed into the plans for UniSA’ s future development.
Vice-chancellor David Lloyd with students.
“ We hope to have some insightful ideas that may change the way we approach our services right now or indeed how we plan our“ business” in the next five years,” Lloyd said.
So far, nearly 900 students, staff and alumni have registered for the unijam in the first few hours, with the initiative also attracting the support of South Australia’ s premier Jay Weatherill.“ Since becoming premier, I’ ve sought new and innovative ways of engaging people in decision making that affects them – that’ s why I wanted to be involved in unijam,” he said.
The SA premier said he was excited to be involved in an initiative that will involve the entire university community in planning for its future. n
Monash pulls plug on IT jobs
Dozens of IT jobs will go at Monash University after it announced workers will be offered voluntary redundancies.
The university alerted staff in its eSolutions division of the planned redundancies, and have identified at least 80 of these workers as eligible to express interest.
A spokeswoman for Monash University said the offer has been made to reduce operating costs in line with the university’ s budget.
To encourage workers to take redundancy, Monash has added a further $ 10,000 to the value of the voluntary redundancy package.
The calls for voluntary redundancies have come off the back of the announcement that federal cuts will be made to the tertiary sector.
But the spokeswoman for Monash said:“ The offer has been made solely as a result of planned cost savings as a result of centralisation of services, not as a consequence of the recent announcement regarding funding cuts by the federal government.”
8 | May 2013
The tertiary education union said the job cuts are the second of three tranches of cuts to eSolutions and warn that there are more cuts to come.
The National Tertiary Education Union’ s industrial organiser at Monash, Stan Rosenthal, said the first round of job cuts were announced late last year, and that the union was told that two more rounds would occur.“ So there is a third round on the way, with about 500 staff in that part of eSolutions not yet affected.”
He said the cuts to solutions are unlikely to be limited to those who take redundancies, as Monash’ s redundancy packages will only be available to fullterm staff.
Rosenthal said those who are not“ continuing”( permanent) employees will not be offered packages and that their contracts will not be renewed.
He said the union was advised by Monash that if the initial response from workers was“ insufficient”, selected individuals would be encouraged to reconsider their reluctance to take a redundancy package.
The spokeswoman for Monash confirmed that the university will reassess the need for additional job reduction in around two months time, once the level of interest in the offer has been properly measured.
The union also claims Monash failed to properly notify the union of the planned redundancies and has lodged a formal dispute notification which instructs Monash to freeze the processing of expression of interest by staff.
Rosenthal said the union was given an informal“ heads up” on April 22 – the day prior to the announcement, adding that the union was not approached in a way that conforms to the enterprise agreement.
He said the university has agreed to not process expressions of interest, adding“ if they breach that provision we will go straight to Fair Work Commission”. n