In the 21st century, could university campuses become redundant as more people turn to online learning? The need for us to regularly upskill for our careers is also influencing the traditional university business model.
Universities have evolved significantly over the centuries, and in the 21st century,they continue to evolve. The trend towards online study, which has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, raises the question of whether universities will always have physical campuses. And in Australia, the government is steering students towards STEM careers and away from the humanities.
In this episode, Tom discusses these issues with Professor Jill Downie, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic at Curtin University.
Associate Professor Jill Downie
The government's funding changes are meddling with the purpose of universities
Email thefutureof@curtin.edu.au.
Curtin University supports academic freedom of speech. The views expressed in The Future Of podcast may not reflect those of the university.
Music: OKAY by 13ounce Creative Commons – Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0. Music promoted by Audio Library.
You can read the full transcript for the episode here.
Intro:
This is The Future Of, where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping shape it for the better.
Tom Robinson:
00:10 Hello again. Welcome to a new episode of The Future Of. I'm Tom Robinson. For centuries, universities have been viewed as the cornerstones of a strong civil society, creating and disseminating the knowledge that powers progress. Throughout their history, they've evolved from small groups of scholars meeting in each other's homes to sprawling multi-campus institutions, and in the 21st century, they've continued to evolve.
Tom Robinson:
00:34 In Australia, the government is trying to steer students towards STEM careers and away from the humanities. In fact, parliament has just a great to charge more for courses deemed not relevant to jobs growth. We're also seeing a shift to online study, a trend that's been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Could it be that universities will again become a community without a physical campus? With me today to discuss this topic is Professor Jill Downie, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Academic from Curtin University. Thanks for coming in today, Jill.
Professor Jill Downie:
01:07 Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Tom Robinson:
01:09 Just how significant in impact has the COVID-19 pandemic had on universities?
Professor Jill Downie:
01:14 I think the impact of the pandemic has been very significant. We've seen across the Australian higher education sector all of the students go home and learn online. Different states have been affected differently, but still, for some of my colleagues in both Victoria and in New South Wales, students are still studying predominantly online. So, it has been a big impact. I think it's affected the way students learn. Those who were coming to university for the first time had only been here a few weeks when we all had to go home, so they didn't get that university experience that they were so looking for, going to the library, having cups of coffee with friends, going to the tavern, joining sporting clubs. So, I think it has been significant both from a learning experience and from a student experience as well. My role on the National Commission of UNESCO as the Education Commissioner, we talk a lot about the impact on students worldwide. So, it's disproportionately affected girls and women in terms of their education because often, as you're aware, schools have been closed, so the women have more of the caring responsibilities and the schooling responsibilities. They've had to leave education as a result of that, and it's also disproportionately affected those from low socioeconomic groups as well because of the lack of equipment, the number of people in a household who are all trying to be online at the one time, so it's affected studies in that regard. It might be broadband, other sort of technological complications from having to study at home. So, when you look across the whole of society, there's no doubt, from a learning perspective and worldwide, as I say, it's been a very significant pandemic, I guess, as you would expect.
Tom Robinson:
03:20 To bring it sort of a bit more local or at least back to Australia, could you maybe explain to our listeners who might not be across this, the impact of border closures and international students not being able to come to study at our universities, what the impact of that has been?
Professor Jill Downie:
03:36 Yeah. Look, I can. Obviously, my background is health, and so, from a health perspective, the border closures have been a really good policy decision. Here in Western Australia, it really has kept us safe, and we saw that with even the closure of borders across our state where you couldn't, at one point, travel from one geographical area to another. It did keep Indigenous people safe. It kept COVID out of the regional areas where there's less facilities and infrastructure and resources. So, the border closures, from that perspective and in terms of reducing the number of international people that travelled to Australia, has been a good policy decision from that perspective, but very early in COVID, as you would know, we found that our international students couldn't travel to the university to start semester one. We initially thought this was only going to affect our international students. Little did we know, the year would play out as it has, and the pandemic of course reach every corner of the earth.
Professor Jill Downie:
04:44 So, we catered for our international students. About 900 started studying with us offshore, and we had to make lots of changes to our curriculum, our teaching and learning so that we could cater for those students. By and large, they've stayed with us throughout the pandemic, completing their studies in semester one and then, of course, into semester two, but universities have been impacted by students not being able to come onto campus in the numbers that they normally would, so it's affected us financially, but I think the big reason that international students are so welcome in Australia is just the diversity and the richness that they provide our society and, in fact, on a university campus, provide other students in terms of interacting with international students and learning from other cultures and having that experience of having lots of people from all sorts of different parts of the world in your class.
Professor Jill Downie:
05:50 So, it's affected us, I think, in a variety of ways. In Western Australia, because our international student numbers aren't as large as they are on the eastern seaboard, we haven't been financially impacted in the way that many universities have, but still, it's been significant, but as I say, not just financial, from a social and cultural perspective as well.
Tom Robinson:
06:15 Particularly, with some of these universities in the Eastern States, the economic or financial side of the lack of international students has been pretty dire, and it's led to this suggestion that universities are overly reliant on international students to keep that cashflow coming through. Do you think this is the case? If so, why are universities so reliant on international students?
Professor Jill Downie:
06:39 Look, I think there were words of warning prior to COVID that many universities were enrolling very large numbers of international students and that in some universities, they were predominantly from one geographical area or another, so as you say, that heavy reliance on international students. I think over time, universities have enrolled international students to sort of make up for the shortfall that they were filling in terms of funding from the Australian Government. From Curtin's perspective, we started enrolling international students very early in the piece in terms of the sector-wide experience. So, back in the early 1980s, we were one of the first universities to enrol international students. I think Monash was about the same time on the eastern seaboard. We were well ahead of the curve.
Professor Jill Downie:
07:40 The then Vice-Chancellor, Lance Twomey, really wanted to do this to enrich the student experience, to provide opportunities for international students to come to Australia and have the Australian experience, but also, as I said, to make sure that our Australian students learned from others around the globe and really had a rich experience learning from friends and colleagues from different parts of the world. I think over time, in different universities, they have relied on the income from international students particularly to fund research activities. As we got into the '90s and the 2000s, particularly, the Group of Eight realised that they could attract international students and that, that was a source of additional income that could be reinvested back into teaching and learning and back into research.
Professor Jill Downie:
08:36 So, it's happened slowly over time and I guess built to where we found ourselves now with some reliance in some universities. I think having international students on Australian campuses is always a good thing though. It really does add to the student experience. It adds to the richness and diversity of our Australian culture, and I wouldn't like to see a situation where that was actively discouraged because international students aren't about funds. They are about what we can offer them but also what they can offer us from an education and student experience perspective.
Tom Robinson:
09:20 Given some of these changes, whether it be a shift to online study, whether it be a change in international students and borders, and the pandemic has very much been a catalyst for a lot of change lately, do you think this will have a long-term effect? Do you think by 2050, we're going to be looking at completely different university or a different kind of model of a university?
Professor Jill Downie:
09:46 I do think it will have a longer term effect. By 2050, gosh, the world won't look the way it currently looks now. I've been working in my current role as Deputy Vice-Chancellor since 2012, and even before that, Curtin was innovating a lot in the teaching and learning space. Over the past eight years, we've done a lot to change the way teaching and learning happens. So, we've changed our classrooms. We've moved gradually away from lectures. We've flipped our classroom, made things more interactive, and there's no doubt, COVID has absolutely sped that up.
Professor Jill Downie:
10:23 So, we had about 100 plus fully online courses before COVID, but we were able to, as I said, have all of our students study online just in a matter of a week or two because of what we'd learned from our earlier experiences. It meant, for the most part, the experiences for students were good in the teaching and learning space. I think if you project forward and look at what are some of the gains from COVID, most universities say they're not going to go back to have weekly lectures. Many, many universities are moving away from exams, much more toward authentic assessment. This was a path we were on before COVID, but it certainly has accelerated the new developments in teaching and learning.
Professor Jill Downie:
11:16 There's a report that comes out annually called the Horizon Report. It comes out of the US, and it's a collaboration of academics all over the world. We contribute to that publication as well. They say that in the US, their 10-year projections of what were going to happen over the next 10 years in the US in teaching and learning happened within three months during COVID. So, that's the sort of pace of acceleration we've seen in the teaching and learning space. So, we will see more online learning, but that doesn't mean the demise of the campus.
Professor Jill Downie:
11:54 The campus should and will continue to be one of the options for students who want to study in person, who want to have that rich campus life and the rich experience, but by 2050, there's all sorts of innovations that will be in place. We'll have holograms by then. We've got that in part now although that's not an everyday part of our classroom. We'll have our online experiences being quite immersive in 3D rather than just engaging with material. We'll have a lot of flexibility. Probably, you'll develop your own schedule about where you learn and when you learn. We won't have timetables. I think our learning spaces will look quite different as well, probably a bit more like the makerspace we see today rather than even the collaborative classroom, which is pretty cutting edge really on a world basis. So, I think there'll be lots of things that look different by 2030.
Tom Robinson:
12:57 With that move to online teaching, is this a good thing? Are there pros and cons? What do you think?
Professor Jill Downie:
13:05 Look, it is a good thing because I think it creates choice and flexibility for students. What we're planning to do at Curtin is really ensure that we take the best of what we learned out of COVID, and move to a totally blended model as we go forward. So, that means part of your learning will be accessing materials and interacting with materials prior to coming to class, and then when you spend your time on campus, having a really engaging interactive experience with your lectures where you're thinking critically and problem-solving and working on real-world activities, so something really authentic.
Professor Jill Downie:
13:46 These days, as you know, you can get a lot of your information off the internet. You don't need a lecturer to necessarily stand in front of you and tell you everything that's written in the book. You've got access to all the books online, but you do need your lecturer to facilitate your learning, to point you in the right direction, to ask the probing questions, to have you work on problems, to think about how are you going to apply this in the workplace given the jobs of the future are changing and the world, in fact, is changing, but online is not for everyone.
Professor Jill Downie:
14:20 What we found during COVID was that those who studied online when they weren't planning to really describe that they lacked a sense of belonging. It's really hard online to replicate that feeling that you get coming onto campus face-to-face, meeting with your friends and your mates and having that cup of coffee, or sitting around, thinking about the problems of the world and how they should be solved. That sense of belonging, we're working hard to recreate in the online space, but I think across the sector, when I talk to my counterparts, they also say their students report the same thing, but for many people, online learning is efficient. It's effective. It's a good use of their time and energy and resources, and that's the way they want to do it. Others want to be fully on campus and enjoy that experience. Some want a mixture of both. I think what we know in education is that choice and flexibility, personalised learning at scale is where education is going.
Tom Robinson:
15:37 I think that choice is important for different courses and different individuals. On a different kind of track about choice, I want to spend some time talking about the new higher education legislation that's been passed recently and, just as a bit of background, the government deciding that certain courses aren't job-ready, creating job-ready graduates, and changing how universities are funded to try and steer people away from things like humanities and steer them towards, as we said, STEM courses, science, maths, teaching, and nursing, and these kind of things. What are your thoughts on this development as it's played out?
Professor Jill Downie:
16:08 Personally, I think it's disappointing that we would use a funding mechanism to try and steer students in this way. What we know about education is that you will learn the best and you'll learn most about what you're absolutely passionate about. So, if you're passionate about creativity and art and communication and the social sciences, then that's what you should study. We're keen that students follow their passion, they follow the inquiry that they want to dive deeply into, and that they're the subjects that they study. I would also argue that creativity and what the humanities has to offer is what's needed in the future.
Professor Jill Downie:
16:55 There's no evidence that students in humanities don't get employment. They absolutely do. Sometimes, some of the science students find a bit more difficulty in gaining employment initially. So, there doesn't, to me, seem to be any logic saying, "Well, you won't need the humanities in the future. Therefore, don't study those. Study STEM." The STEM subjects are incredibly important. If you look at maths, computing, science, all of those subjects are going to be required for automation, for artificial intelligence, for robotics, for the world that we're moving into, but as the world changes and the jobs of the future change as well, we're also going to need much more in the communication space, in the creativity space.
Professor Jill Downie:
17:48 If people do work in a gig economy and they have a bit more leisure time, they'll need to know what to do with that leisure. They'll need experts in a variety of leisure type fields, be that the arts or writing or theatre or production so that they can spend their time fruitfully. So, I guess I don't accept the argument that you should only study STEM, you shouldn't study the humanities. I think you should follow your passion. All of those disciplines are incredibly important, and they will be for the jobs of the future.
Tom Robinson:
18:25 Politicians like Jacqui Lambie have attracted headlines lately. She attracts a lot of headlines for various reasons, but at this particular time, it was a very sort of passionate speech about children or young people from low socioeconomic backgrounds feeling like they can't go to university or not being able to afford to go to university because of these funding changes. I suppose my question is, is university for everyone, or is it just for the people that can afford to be here?
Professor Jill Downie:
18:56 I'd like to think university is for everyone. It's a long time since we moved from elite education in universities back in the day to mass higher education. We've had mass higher education now for many, many decades. What it's done is it's educated the broad population, whether you're rich or poor, no matter your nationality or background. That's really important. Education is transformative. It does change people's lives. It helps them follow their passion. It helps them gain employment. That employment assists families to do better, to strive for more things. It is transformational. You hear many people say that, "If it wasn't for the study that I did, I wouldn't have gone on to do such and such." That's really important. So, I think education should be for everyone. I share some of the concerns, and I heard Jacqui Lambie speak, and I think we should be concerned that we're making education not affordable for some.
Professor Jill Downie:
20:07 I guess what we're trying to do as a university is to provide scholarships and to help students who are from lower socioeconomic groups, we're trying get regional students into the university and support them so that they can study. Curtin has a wonderful reputation of looking after low socioeconomic students, indigenous students, those with disability, and our 'First in Family' is well above 25 per cent of our students. That's something we should be really proud of. We're providing education to people who are in families that have never been to university before. They're not just surviving at university. They're thriving. So I, too, am concerned about the equity aspects of the current situation, but I think it's up to universities to provide for students so that we can make sure that there's education for all.
Tom Robinson:
21:08 Yeah. I think it's really important that everyone have that opportunity. That's all we've got time for today. Thank you, Jill, for sharing your knowledge on this topic.
Professor Jill Downie:
21:15 Thanks very much. Lovely to chat.
Tom Robinson:
21:18 You've been listening to The Future Of, the podcast powered by Curtin University. If you have any questions about this episode, get in touch by following the links in the show notes. Wherever you're joining us today, don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. Bye for now.