Green Apple Issue 5 | Page 7

SAA status is a mark of the quality of SAE as an institution and the excellence of our staff within it. It also acknowledges our ability to design curriculum and undertake quality assurance to a high level.

We’re now in a small elite group of only 13 other providers within the sector who have been granted SAA. Ultimately, it gives us the opportunity to accredit our own programs up to bachelor degree level in the fields of Creative Arts and Computer Science.

The main reason we decided to go through the process was to ensure our students always have access to the most relevant and contemporary curriculum in Creative Arts and Computer Science.

These are fields that undergo constant change and evolution, so it’s essential our quality assurance processes can keep pace with the latest scholarship, research and industry practice in these fields.

At SAE, our focus is doing everything we can to set our graduates up for success; whether that’s connecting them with workplace opportunities or undertaking further study. Now that we have SAA, we can ensure that students will receive the benefits of our program review and improvement activities more efficiently.

These improvements to our curriculum will give our students a competitive edge. We’ve already begun looking to the future to see what skills and knowledge our graduates will need, and making sure these are embedded into SAE’s curriculum.

We’ve started to explore innovative new courses in fields such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing and simulation technologies. These emerging fields lend themselves well to creativity, innovation and lateral thinking - attributes SAE, its students and staff all possess.

The last five years have been a whole institution journey towards SAA. There wasn’t any department that didn’t contribute in some way. Since the award was granted, we unfortunately haven’t had a chance to celebrate, but once we’re all able to travel and get some time away from the classroom, I hope we can congratulate one another on what is a key milestone in SAE Australia’s history.