Sensational-Adelaide.com

UniSA’s campus plans: keep Magill, add city health hub

The University of South Australia won’t be leaving its Magill Campus – and is exploring plans to provide accommodation on its campuses for international students.

UniSA has also confirmed it is well-advanced in its plans for a “health precinct” near the Royal Adelaide Hospital – as revealed by InDaily last week.

These are some of the conclusions to be drawn from the university’s experiment with online consultation – dubbed “unijam”.

“I can say with some certainty that it is clear from our conversation during unijam that Magill will remain an important part of our university’s future as a vibrant educational precinct,” Vice-Chancellor David Lloyd told students in an email on Friday.

Irish import Lloyd is the driving force behind unijam – a one-off online forum involving the university’s students, staff, and postgrads plus high-profile guests including Premier Jay Weatherill.

The ‘jam’ ran last Wednesday and Thursday and attracted around 7500 participants – around 12.5 per cent of the university’s student body, a figure Lloyd called disappointing – who generated 16,633 posts between them.

“It went really well,” Lloyd told InDaily yesterday from his office in the university’s City West campus.

“I set out with the objective to try to get into a place where we could cut across hierarchies, cut across divisions, and we could get people metaphorically in the same room to talk about what was important for the university.”

The discussion forums had already generated several changes that would be rolled out immediately, some as early as next week, Lloyd said.

“Not earthshattering, but it’ll be the opposite of the death by a thousand cuts – it’s going to be adding a thousand bandages.”

Many of the changes took the form of small improvements – easy wins. But the discussions would also lead to some changes in the overall direction of the university, Lloyd said.

“One in particular that I’m going to try and put through, and that would be the strategic plan. That will be a sizeable impact on the institution.

“There are some big pieces. A very strong thread that came through was around bureaucracy and process, and the need to streamline the process so that you have a nimbler institution.”

In a subforum on accommodation, Deputy Vice Chancellor International Nigel Relph posted that the university was keen to develop on-campus accommodation for international students.

“This is definitely on the UniSA agenda,” he said.

“It is vital for a good international student experience, but also in my view we are simply not competitive in the international student market place. Watch this space.”

InDaily reported last week the university was keen to build a health precinct on a vacant site alongside the under-construction Royal Adelaide Hospital.

Posting on the unijam website, the University’s Dean of Health Education, Professor Esther May, said it was likely the new precinct would be interdisciplinary.

“I can imagine the mix of IT, health, social services, Aboriginal health, engineering, management, marketing, architecture in developing such a hub,” she said.

InDaily understands plans for the precinct are much more advanced than initially reported, and have been discussed at senior government levels for several months. Concept plans for the new precinct are understood to have been completed.

Massively-online-open-courses (MOOCs) – in which courses are offered entirely online, often for free – are currently the buzzword for the university sector.

Lloyd said unijam indicated there wasn’t widespread student support for replacing face-to-face classes with MOOCs.

“There’s no massive drive toward wholly online environment. The sentiments of both the students and the staff and those who are engaged in this is that the MOOC is one component of the future learning experience.

“It almost reinforced the importance of face-to-face teaching in the context of tutorials and engagement.”

Lloyd said the jam’s success had encouraged him to begin making plans to run another one in 18 to 24 months’ time.

A final public report on unijam outcomes is expected to be released publically by the university in August.