Campus Review Volume 28 - Issue 9 | September 2018 | Seite 8

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campusreview.com.au
”Millions of hours of student effort are
wasted preparing for and completing
tasks that test their knowledge. They
sit listening to broadcast lectures or
undertake theoretical conversations
in an intellectual vacuum. All the while
wicked problems, many of them a result
of market failure, continue to eat away at
the stability of our society.
The Applied Model is designed
to better cater to the needs of both
students and society in an environment
where the half-life of new knowledge is
on a continuous decline.”
Out with the old
Change education models or
risk sinking into irrelevance,
universities warned.
By Dallas Bastian
A
ustralian universities need a new
approach to education, one that
harnesses the enthusiasm of
the next generation of students to solve
society’s biggest problems, a new white
paper has argued.
Its authors said students who attend
university because of the cultural narrative
that it will get them a better job are following
an outdated playbook. Those graduating
this year instead face fewer than ever ‘zero
experience’ entry-level graduate roles and an
environment in which employers are caring
less about university degrees.
“These graduates are taking roles that
someone without an expensive university
education can easily fill,” the white paper
read. “If this trend continues, then a
university education becomes less of a
pathway to meaningful employment and
more of a luxury good.”
6
(Sustainable, Manageable, Accessible,
Rural Technologies) by the University of
New England. They said it would fit into
the Applied Model should UNE reframe
its purpose to become a centre of global
excellence and expertise in sustainable
agriculture and focus the whole institution
on addressing the issue.
“This general problem is underpinned by a
vast number of deep and expansive subsets
of significant global appeal to government,
industry and society which present
opportunities for exploration, learning and
improvement to all disciplines,” they said.
THE ROLE OF THE TEACHER
The team acknowledged that the sector
has been drowned in dialogue about the
need for universities to adapt and renew
but added its paper is the first to propose
a distinct approach they could leverage to
remain relevant and valuable to students.
The proposed solution? Listen to the
voice of the customer and change the
model of learning.
Authored by David Burt, innovation
manager at the CSIRO, along with Michael
Locke and Matthew Wilson from marketing,
brand and strategy consultancy LOCKE,
the paper proposed that the conventional
approach to higher education – termed
the Knowledge Model and focused on
the creation, curation and distribution of
knowledge – is no longer effective.
Instead, it suggested universities adopt a
new model that requires them to embrace
a design where they are responsible
for the creation of new knowledge, the
curation of problem statements and the
direction and credentialing of student effort
against these issues. They called this the
Applied Model.
The authors provided the example of
expanding on the SMART Farms initiative
Under the Applied Model, the teacher is
charged with taking on the role of a coach,
rather than the custodian of a knowledge
pool. They would walk students through
problem-solving experiences to show how
knowledge can be practically applied in the
real world.
“Through attacking a specific problem,
they learn skills required to work in
an ambiguous work environment, an
approach that better prepares them for a
career likely to change dramatically over
time,” the paper read. The authors spent
18 months developing the white paper.
During the research phase, the team found
that most ideas that could play a role in
redefining Australian universities propose
only minor alterations to the existing model
and “disappointingly focus more on the
survival of the institution than the improved
development of its end products – the
graduates of a new generation”.
“While we dismiss the more outlandish
doom and gloom dialogue … we do believe
that there remains a dangerous naivety in
the Australian higher education sector that
believes ‘business as usual’ is an acceptable
path forward.”  ■