ON CAMPUS
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Photo: Sally Tsoutas
External street view. Photo: Bryan Siebel
Photo: Sally Tsoutas
and to staff from PwC, but also a number of the other businesses
in the region.
Surprisingly, the new campus does not have any lecture theatres –
what was the thinking behind this?
It was a very conscious decision. It is part of our belief about the
future of learning and teaching, so we have no lecture theatres. We’ve
designed very interactive, very technically rich learning studios. We
re-developed our curriculum and we’ve supported a new approach
to teaching for our staff. What we believe is that we should create
the environment and the learning experiences that encourage our
students to be actively engaged in learning rather than sitting passively
in a lecture theatre. So we may be the first to not build lecture
theatres in our new building, but many universities are recognising the
somewhat limited pedagogic value of lectures, and the much deeper
learning that is derived when students are actively engaged in working
through problems, connecting with ideas, working with their peers,
and interacting with staff around the real questions and the real issues.
Beyond the lack of lecture theatres, there seems to be a focus on
enabling students to work digitally with their peers, is that correct?
Yes. We’ve set up our learning studios in a way that encourages
collaborative work, but also supports individual work. The spaces
are set up to support group work. Students will bring their own
devices in. We have software through the rooms that allow
students to share the document they’re working on or the problem
they’re solving, or the graph they’re developing. They can just
share it with each other on their own devices, but each group table
has a large monitor and computer screen. They can throw their
documents and their images up, so every member of the group
could put the document that he or she is working on up so that the
group can see every document at once, or they can choose the
best worked example and talk their way through it.
Photo: Nicole England
A teacher, an academic, might identify that there’s a particularly
elegant solution that one of the students has come up with that
can be shared with everybody, either to their table screens or to
big screens on the wall. So that’s one aspect of it – making it rich in
terms of collaboration.
Another component is that we have writable walls. Everybody
loves white boards; students love to work their solutions and
their problems out on the white boards, but we can capture
that on camera and then share it onto screens. We can share
it with somebody at a remote location, so either an expert or a
professional or a guest academic on another site, or we can involve
students who for whatever reason can’t make it to class.
So would you say this is about structuring learning in a way that
perhaps more closely resembles what their workplace will be like
when they do enter the workforce?
That has certainly informed our thinking about not only the design of
the learning spaces, but the whole environment in the building – this is
the home of predominantly our School of Business – and we believe
this creates the sort of environment our students are going to work in
when they graduate, and some of them are already working in it. It’s a
familiar environment, it’s very modern, it’s very contemporary, it’s rich
technologically in terms of the room booking system, the information
about the building, the information about transport, the digital way-
finding throughout the building.
So we know students will be working in environments that
require them to be highly collaborative, that require them to
interact and use technologies well. We believe we’re going to
equip our students with those skill sets and develop their skills
in working well collaboratively, working with a range of different
people, working in an open and flexible environment, and being
very comfortable using technology to support collaboration and to
deliver all of their work. ■
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