Behind UNE’s ambitious plans to extend well beyond its Armidale base, is its Vice Chancellor, Professor Jim Barber, a man who has proven his versatility as a leader by managing a potential crisis for the institution while simultaneously rolling out its innovative plans for the future.
Located in the grand and prestigious former post office building in Parramatta’s CBD. The university chose Western Sydney to launch its first FutureCampus because the region is an existing market for UNE’s distance learning students.
“FutureCampus is actually a prototype of what I think one future for the university will be. I think in the next decade or two we'll see greater diversification in universities,” UNE Vice Chancellor, Professor Jim Barber, told WSBA.
“Up until now they've all looked pretty much like replicas of one another and I think we're going to see greater diversity. Effectively what it's doing is using broadband to create a network of universities and sites all around Australia and eventually, all around the world.”
Professor Barber said that in his view, the days of building university campuses were well and truly over. His vision for the tertiary education is based on a system of learning nodes which would facilitate the learning experience for students.
But it would allow enhancements which, until now, have not been possible under the conventional tertiary education model, including a student’s ability to benefit from various lectures delivered in different parts of the globe and the possibility to conduct remote scientific experiments.
“We've got enough university campuses, in fact we've got too many in Australia already. And we don't need them with broadband and we're trying to model that in Parramatta,” he said.
Parramatta, as one of the key population centres in western Sydney, wasn’t a random choice of location, but rather, was based on hard statistical evidence of where UNE’s distance learning population was located and where growth was likely to be into the future.
“We already had, before we put a FutureCampus in there, more students in Western Sydney than we had here in Armidale in our colleges,” Professor Barber said.
“We just have a lot of distance education students, so I thought let's put this down there because we know we've got a ready-made market there and it's one we can build up.
“I'm increasingly saying our main business model is going to be an off-campus model. We'll still try and preserve our campus here, of course, but building our operation will involve distance learning because we know how to do it already and that's where the growth is.”
The FutureCampus approach to further education highlights the importance and applications possible with high bandwidth broadband that will ultimately be available to all Australians through the National Broadband Network.
But with the rollout of the NBN only partially complete, UNE has able to access the broadband network used exclusively by Australia’s universities and research organisations: Aarnet.
The Aarnet backbone runs 400m past the back door of FutureCampus and so UNE ran fibre to connect the network to the premises.
“If it hadn't been Aarnet, well for a start I wouldn't have gotten to do this until the NBN rolled out completely,” Professor Barber said.
“With FutureCampus, what we're looking at doing from here is to run connections either to other universities or to sites like the FutureCampus where more students can participate.”
Professor Barber believes broadband internet will, in decades to come, enable the perceived disadvantage of regional students to city students to be addressed.
But he said it will also bridge the kind of competitive gap faced by institutions like UNE who compete for the traditional school-leaver student market.
“Most of the people I talk to keep thinking domestic market, but once you think cyberspace, there's no such thing as domestic or international anymore,” Professor Barber said.
“There are no geographic boundaries so potentially; we could use this model to recapture the massive loss in market share we've experienced in international students.
“We've never had much of an international student market because we're regional, but some universities have really built all of their capital works and everything on the back of international numbers, which have collapsed and they've had to really pull their belt in.”
He said UNE had had never relied on international students but intended to build its international market.
“We've got our connection with University of California Irvine but we don't have a FutureCampus like the one in Parramatta, offshore,” Professor Barber said.
“At the moment we're negotiating to put one in China and that's when people will say 'oh, I see what you can do internationally'.”
Professor Barber said too many universities continued to pursue on-campus business models, which were ideally suited to school leavers but very poorly suited to working adults.
