campusreview. com. au
VC’ S CORNER
and enhancing our natural environment is a worthy goal, but we recognise its limitations for promoting growth. As sports administrator David Gallop is well-known for saying, sometimes you need to“ fish where the fish are”. While we can certainly accommodate growth at the Wollongong campus, our research also told us that each day, 7000 students leave south-western Sydney to attend a university outside the area.
To address this, In May this year, the New South Wales Premier and minister for western Sydney, Mike Baird, joined us to announce plans to open a south-western Sydney campus in Liverpool. The new campus will open in 2017, initially occupying two floors in the Liverpool City Council’ s Moore Street building, before moving into larger premises in Liverpool’ s new Civic Place development, expected to be completed in 2019. The Liverpool campus represents a major, long-term commitment that is aligned with the Commonwealth Government’ s agenda of providing opportunities through a more accessible, competitive, sustainable and higher quality tertiary education system. innovation and our determination that the university will continue to play a key role in sustaining Wollongong’ s vibrancy and cultural diversity. We’ ll build on the high-quality landscape and public realm of the existing campus while improving its links with the surrounding community and connections to Wollongong and our other campuses in Australia, Dubai and Hong Kong.
NEEDS OF THE FUTURE When I came into the university sector, we were about ideals and ideas. The narrative has shifted over the last decade, to include impact. This has sharpened the focus of our teaching, research, and the facilities to support that outcome. Bricks and mortar, in themselves, are not the answer.
While our local media always focuses on the immediate tangible issues of car parking and building heights, an overlooked aspect of our campus master plan is the strategy of taking advantage of technology to create digital working, learning and teaching spaces. Classrooms can be created that are flexible to accommodate different styles of teaching, as well as enable students and academics to communicate, collaborate and socialise seamlessly with others – face-to-face and in a virtual world. This process has already started, with the opening late last year of a Sciences Teaching Facility, and will evolve as we adapt to meet the changing nature of education.
Being flexible in our use of space while consciously protecting
THINK GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL Universities are being asked to demonstrate that their research makes a difference. Governments want clear evidence that investment in basic research is translated into local and national impact. The balance between blue-sky research and marketfacing work will change and we must understand this agenda, and engage in a relevant way that does not diminish our capacity to be at the cutting edge of our subjects.
This is both a threat and an opportunity. The biggest change in our capacity to innovate could come through a better understanding of the skills needed to empower the workforce of the future. We also need to drive the exchange of ideas and knowledge between universities and businesses in new ways. This remains one of the great weaknesses of the way the Australian higher-education system is structured.
UoW has partnered with the New South Wales Government to deliver a new program, Advantage SME, which is funded as part of the NSW Government’ s Boosting Business Innovation Program. The partnership will provide small and medium-sized enterprises with a one-stop access point for the capabilities available at UoW, including academics, students, researchers and our labs.
This exciting project will provide local SMEs with easier access to the resources, equipment and academic expertise to help them build their businesses, create new employment and expand the local economy. We are already working in partnership with the NSW Government for the iAccelerate program, including the recent opening of a $ 16.5 million purpose-built facility to nurture startups. But this new funding allows us to expand our engagement with business and offer a wider range of support to SMEs in our changing local economy.
I look forward to all of these onshore activities coming together: a Wollongong campus that is a hub of student life, combining technology with the natural environment; a place where we turn research into action; seeing our graduates securing the type of jobs to which they aspire; and a future landscape with new enterprises that most of us have yet to dream of. ■
Paul Wellings is the vice-chancellor of the University of Wollongong.
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