Start thinking about HEPPP Projects

UNE HEPPP [Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program] applications are typically due at the end of September, and the funding available can provide support for exciting initiatives. Successful applications tend to focus on larger cohorts of students, and attract about $150,000 to $250,000, so, if you have some ideas for a project, I’d encourage you to ‘think big’, and consider ways that the project can stretch across other schools and faculties at UNE. You will need to think about the specific HEPPP student cohort you’ll focus on [Low SES; Indigenous; or Regional and Remote], and the stage of the student lifecycle you’ll address [pre-access, access, participation, or attainment and transition out]. It’s also important that you identify clear goals, and establish some clear evaluation measure for determining if you’ve met those goals. The application form is typically not very long, but there is substantial amount of planning required to bring together a large team across several areas, hence why I’d encourage anyone interested to start planning now.

New ideas for 2026!

It’s time to start thinking about 2026! As you may have seen from my regular ADTL digests, there are a few new course ideas in development, but there’s always room for more. I’d particularly like to encourage colleagues to think about ways to partner with community and industry groups. Is there a new way we can embed work-integrated learning into our teaching, or is there a way we can connect our students more closely with the world outside of academia. There’s plenty of time before we commence the 2025 governance cycle, but it always feels like the time for these discussions runs out so fast, so I’d encourage everyone to organise some brainstorming sessions, and please reach out to me directly if there’s anything you’d like to discuss!

On-campus common hours

Our on-campus student numbers continue to decline, and I’d like to encourage departments to reconsider the possibility of ‘common hours’ of on-campus experience that can sit within units either: across a discipline, across a department, or even across the school. The advantages of this from a student perspective are that it will add an on-campus class/experience to the many units that are currently Online only. This may effectively enable us to offer more units as On-campus offerings. Individual unit coordinators will just need to advise students of the ‘common hour’ and inform them of the schedule, as the ‘common hour’ will simply appear in their unit timetables. It will also bring like-minded students together into a common class to discuss themes/issues relevant to their broader studies. It provides the ‘On-campus experience’ that many on-campus students desire [ie. learning face-to-face, social networking, meeting students outside their particular unit but in similar studies, meeting staff, etc], while adding to the existing learning content. It also provides scope for some Departments/Courses to address content that may not otherwise be explicit with specific units, such as Lantite [National Literacy and Numeracy Test] and GTPA [Graduate Teaching Proficiency Assessment] expectations, course progression, etc.