What will the University of the future look like?
This question and the challenges facing universities were explored at the annual Tertiary Education Management Conference (TEMC 2018) held in Perth in September.
More than 800 delegates from universities across Australia and New Zealand attended to discuss a range of future trends impacting the higher education sector from online and flexible learning to industry collaboration.
This year Programmed sponsored the conference to further develop our ongoing partnership with many universities across Australia and New Zealand. As long-standing members of TEFMA, we saw the sponsorship as an ideal opportunity to further develop our relationships with and understanding of the tertiary sector.
Addressing the TEMC conference in a keynote presentation, our Managing Director, Chris Sutherland spoke about the key drivers of change and what the built environment of the future may look like in tertiary education.
In his keynote, he challenged the audience to harness the opportunities presented by technological and disruptive trends to the sector:
“I think the higher education sector has a great opportunity to interconnect the physical built learning environment with the virtual online learning environment.”
Increasingly as people’s lives go online, the more critical learning for young people will be the face-to-face communication, collaboration, debating, and negotiation life skills.
They (students) also need to learn how to become good citizens as well as acquiring technical skills, just like we teach our trade apprentices at Programmed. People will pay a premium to have that face to face interaction and learning experience at university in the future.
This will require some changes to the built environment as they become more about spaces to meet, talk and collaborate and less about a lecture theatre.
One sees a similar model developing in retail where shopping centres become more about food, entertainment, meeting and socialising whilst at the same time being able to browse and consider some goods to purchase, with the knowledge that one can access more detail and more range online.
Indeed it’s not hard to imagine the build environment of a future shopping centre and a university becoming very similar or even one and the same!”
So how can Programmed help universities of the future? Watch our video to explore the possibilities!
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