Community Conversation

RMIT's origins as a working men's college was designed to create opportunity for a growing city. Our ability to create partnerships that support and enrich the communities we serve has now become even more important. A key question might be where to invest and partner to ensure the greatest impact in the five years to 2025. See less

‘Ready for Life and Work’ has been a very good foundation for what’s next – 5 to 20 years. It sets a precursor for the fast-changing world. And RMIT should continue with this progress by providing education that focuses on developing lifelong skillsets. We are already fortunate given we are a dual sector university, from which ‘potentials’ may arise to be a multi-sector institution that creates and innovates solutions amidst disruptions, and provides education throughout the lifecycle of learners.

As the world evolves more rapidly, certainly our role as a university needs to adapt. Continue and strengthen:
– the next strategy as a very strong platform shared by each and everyone (or majority) as being on board for the change
– supporting all our students from all cohorts succeed and complete (we have great stories of equity students as more determined to complete and graduate with qualifications than the general cohort)
– learn from other sectors that have already experienced disruptions and have had to quickly adapt, and not necessarily the education sector See less

Some of the key changes relevant to RMIT are around how, when and why 21st century learners engage with learning. The demand for smaller ‘bite-sized chunks’ of learning throughout one’s career, instead of or in addition to those traditional early- and mid-career pinnacle points of undergraduate and postgraduate award degrees, is growing every year. What role does RMIT want to play in catering to lifelong learners who value rapid access to specific work-related skills and knowledge more than an accredited degree? How do we best reach these cohorts and deliver the student experience they need? See less

The pace of change is only quickening, and the rate of disruption, particularly within the Education section will only heighten in the next 5 years. For RMIT to stay relevant, we will need to adapt. That’s all of us. Each and everyone one of us. We’ve all heard the expression ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. Being adaptive will be critical for RMIT in the future. Its the heart of intrapreneurship. Adapting to student expectations, adapting to new learning models, adapting to new technology, adapting to staff expectations. How do we make adapting part of our new normal? When a clear strategy meets a supportive culture, we will be invincible. See less

RMIT was built to train and educate people so that they could respond to the issues of the day. A skilled hand and a cultivated mind was never the end goal – it was a foundation upon which problems could be solved and challenges could be overcome.

Ready For Life and Work is an amazing strategy, however it is very much focused on how we can be a great University. What comes next?

Our recent action around Coronavirus has taught us the incredible impact we can have when we focus on how we can solve a problem ‘through the foundation’ of being a great University.

The world is changing. We are presented with incredible threats to society and human existence through climate change and other phenomenon. Our evolution must deliver solutions, and in the act of doing so, we will become an even greater education institution.

Our focus must no longer be “how can we be a great University”, but instead:
How can we, through our foundation of being a great University: Create solutions to address climate change? Address reconciliation, nation-wide? Improve gender equality? Improve diversity? Inclusion? How can we change the world?

This kind of thinking and direction will not only return us to our original outward focus of delivering skilled hands and cultivated minds to overcome the challenges of the day, but also strengthen our foundation, and the way we live our values: so that we are even more inclusive, courageous, imaginative, passionate, and creating positive impact. See less

References:
Baré, E. & Bexley, E. (2017). Redesigning the Higher Education Workforce: A new architecture. In R. James, S. French & P. Kelly (Eds.), Visions for Australian Tertiary Education (pp.133-142). Melbourne, Australia: University of Melbourne.
Clark, B. (1998). The Entrepreneurial University: Demand and Response. Tertiary Education and Management, 4 (1), 5-16.
Hinton, K. E. (2012). A practical guide to strategic planning in higher education. [Johnstown, New York] : Society for College and University Planning, 2012.
Lacy, W. B., Croucher, G., Brett, A., & Mueller, R. (2017). Australian universities at a crossroads: Insights from their leaders and implications for the future. Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education and UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education. Retrieved from: http://melbourne-cshe.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/2368895/Australian-Universities-at-a-Crossroads.pdf
Sharrock, G. (2010). Two Hippocratic oaths for higher education. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 32 (4), 365-377. See less

Ready for Life and Work’ was, in my review of ATN university strategies, unique in its focus on the “service orientation” associated with our students, alumni and industry (Baré and Bexley, 2017, p.133), and that approach makes sense given that “Australian students now contribute to a larger proportion of their tuition costs than most other students in the OECD” (Lacy, Croucher, Brett and Mueller, 2017, p.9). With that in mind, I hope this focus on service excellence continues to evolve, and there is room in the next strategy for thinking and direction around how RMIT increases the effectiveness of services provided throughout the university with a focus on streamlining access and, as much as possible, eliminating bounce between the many organs of an increasingly large institution.

Universities are here to stay! Our mission and range of stakeholders may broaden, but we need our programs and their quality need to be a clear focus in the next strategy. See less

As a publicly-funded institution, I would argue that RMIT’s key priority (or at least one of its highest priorities) should be the education it offers as a public good, furthering and deepening what was started in ‘Ready for Life and Work’. Central to this should be a commitment to quality assurance and enhancement in relation to our current mission of preparing our students for an increasing range of skilled occupations, undertaking research to support areas of national priority and interest to the government and institutional stakeholders (as well as society at large), and increasing participation in tertiary education from disadvantaged groups. RMIT needs to do this in a way that limits the cost of tertiary sector expansion (Sharrock, 2010, p.366), which for me means:
• continuing to invest in the work of program transformation.
• deepening investment in compliance and risk mitigation activities, particularly resolving actions arising from internal and external audits in a timely manner, best preparing us for interactions with our regulators, professional associations and accrediting bodies.
• increasing investment in our systems and processes to ensure that we’re transparent in our decision-making, consistent in our application of policy and process, and minimise potential for error. See less

Apologies in advance, this will be a multi-part post and my response is ostensibly an adaptation of something I wrote for masters back in 2017. It was never published, and thankfully we’re not using TurnItIn on this forum, so for all we know I wrote this just for RMIT NEXT!

I’m not sure it’s the role of the university that’s evolving as much as our (as in RMIT’s) need to understand our ‘unique environment’ and how best to operate in it while being caught up in a ‘grand contradiction’: being required to do more with less to meet the needs of an increasing group of stakeholders, whilst also maintaining our unique heritage as an institution (Hinton, 2012, p.23. (ie. The Working Men’s College, an institution providing education as a public good, established on unceded land which over time evolved and grew into a truly diverse organisation with liberal values and an ever-increasing offering of products aimed at an increasingly broad market that spans the globe.) Are we, as Vest puts it in Clark (1998, p.14) “overextended, under-focussed, overstressed [and] underfunded”? If so, what will be our priorities for the next 5 year period? See less

To answer the question, we should first clarify the current “Role” of our institution, where are we standing now? We can make the question more understandable by considering the extreme situations on the two ends of the spectrum as well as the middle state:
A. Playing a role as a university that its objective is mostly focused on:
o Research, and novelty in scientific productions, and
o High quality of education and cultivating creativity.
B. Playing a role as an institution to train the skills needed in our society, and consequently provide a smart way for a better future for our students (Domestic and Int_onshore).
C. Playing a role like a business that financial gain is the most important objective.

Now RMIT is somewhere between A and B, closer to B. My understanding is RMIT, and other similar scale institutions, are moving from A to B during the 2020’s. The demand of society and the leverage of financial independency from government funds are the two driving factors for such shifting. The consequence of such shifting is larger VE and sector and UGRD and PGRD online courses.
The only factor that I think can have an impact on this scenario is international student demand. See less

As a current RMIT Alumni, I graduated from a Bachelor of Business in Marketing (Applied) which allowed myself to complete a work integrated learning, I completed my internship while also studying part-time. I was luckily enough to have my contract extended for a further year, which extended to working full-time at another organisation post my WIL and studying part-time. Something I have learnt post my degree is the important of digital media vs traditional media.

As our world around is moving online and the focus on retailers becomes more around our digital presence and reaching as many eyeballs as possible, I believe RMIT needs to realign their focus on teaching students the important of digital media – The role, purpose, channels e.g. Social Media, Digital Display, SEM, SEO, ect and how we can measure and learn post campaign.

This is something I have learnt in the field, since graduating and now working full-time for 5 years. See less

I think our role definitely needs to evolve and adapt to what society requires of us. The changing world around us, means that we need to work together to imagine, create and continually re-shape the communities for our students, our staff, our industry partners, and the environment. We are not the same institution that we were in 1887, and we won’t be the same institution in 2200. (180 years from now)

RMIT has grown from a technical college in Melbourne providing education in the arts, technology and trades to become a global university of technology, design and enterprise offering postgraduate, undergraduate and vocational programs. Same Same but different and better.

As Pinker says in his article “ past performance is of course no guarantee of future results, though history is not cyclical, it can be knocked back by nasty surprises”. We need to stay vigilant, and respond and adapt to the needs of our world. We need to continually evolve to make better use of our resources, to utilise technology, to build new knowledge, tap into new demands of industry and new listen to students that demand more from us.

Anticipating and listening to the digital world around us, the environmental issues that we are facing, all of the scary parts as well as the exciting parts – will ensure we evolve in the right way. See less