Commentary by Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Acting), Professor Mike Wilmore
An essential goal of our strategic plan, Future Fit, is to be a resilient university and a core element of this is financial sustainability. To be resilient we must grow enrolments and improve retention to ensure we reach our target of 16,000 full-time equivalent students in ways that balance challenges, risks and opportunities.
The Vice-Chancellor and I organised a summit last week to discuss how we’re planning to achieve this goal. Everyone who attended appreciated that an ambitious growth target may not be an easy thing to reach. Like universities the world over, UNE is facing uncertain times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and major shifts in our economy, amongst other things, and this often makes our planning for the future feel like a very daunting task. But we need not feel overwhelmed, given the great talent and expertise we have here at UNE.
It was fantastic to experience the energy that everyone brought to the summit discussions. We spent three hours together generating a range of ideas for projects we can implement over the coming months. Each Faculty and Division is taking a lead in this work, whilst collaborating with colleagues from across the University through a team-based approach to make our project aims reality. We’re also investing in many different ways to support this work, especially as we finalise our budgets and set Faculties’ enrolment targets through to 2025. It’s important that we get the right mix of actions in place to support commencing and continuing student growth and retention to reach these targets.
To give one example, Anthony Smith and his team in Brand, Partnerships and Business Development have established a new group to support the development of courses and other educational offerings. I know from past experience how challenging it can be to combine marketing, financial and academic information to develop robust business cases for new courses. This new group, which we have named URGENT – standing for the University Revenue Growth Engagement Team, will coordinate this complex task to ensure we significantly reduce the time and effort it takes to create and launch new courses. This builds on the experience we’ve recently developed through our Undergraduate Certificate project.
We will soon begin a series of roadshows for Schools to introduce how URGENT will support their work on new course development. Anthony’s team will work with colleagues in our Faculties and Divisions as required to get this important job done and develop new courses to help reach our growth targets for student enrolment. Recognising that this work needs support, we’ve recently hired an experienced academic, Dr Hugh Brown, to assist in business case development. We’ll profile Hugh in a forthcoming edition of Pulse and trust he’ll become a familiar face around UNE through this work.
Hugh is also supporting Professor Brenda Wolodko, HASSE’s Associate Dean Teaching and Learning, in an incredibly important project that’s investigating how we currently support courses that require accreditation by external professional bodies. It’s a fact that the majority of our students are enrolled such courses in areas like Nursing, Education, Law, and Psychology (to name only a few). It is no exaggeration to say they are foundational for our success. Brenda’s work will ensure we clearly understand what resources and professional development are needed to maintain our impressive record in achieving external course accreditations. This will also be important when we decide how we could move into new areas of professional education with future courses and offerings.
Innovations in our course offerings are made possible through on-going investment in fundamental aspects of our students’ learning at UNE. Thanks to the great feedback we received on proposals for a new academic calendar and academic workload model, we have a much better understanding of the things our students and staff regard as essential to achieve a positive rhythm in our working lives. Coupled with extensive planning for the redesign of our suite of learning technologies and the support mechanisms they need, we’re heading towards a very exciting new environment for research, learning and teaching over the next few years.
None of these improvements to study and work at UNE happen without careful thought, and the summit confirmed we have people of immense talent supporting the achievement of our Future Fit goals. The fact they directed this talent again and again during summit towards discussion of what matters most – our students, their education and their well-being – was a really uplifting. We are rated number one for student experience for good reason, but each contributor demonstrated that this isn’t something we ever take for granted. The fundamentals of how we care for our students will never change. But the summit discussions and the many actions we’re taking to meet our considerable challenges show us something very important. We understand that taking great care of our students and for our colleagues often requires us to be brave and explore different approach to the fundamentals of our work.