In a recent HEDx podcast hosted by Martin Betts, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education and Students) Kylie Readman discussed the launch of UTS’s Global and Digital Growth Program. The conversation (41.50 mins) gave insights into the program’s context within higher education, its connection to core operations at UTS and how it may evolve beyond its initial offerings. In this article, we explore why UTS is choosing this path – and why now is the optimal time to drive this strategy forward.
Serving new learners in new ways
I think staff in Australian universities, including UTS, are always motivated by ensuring students succeed. I think that’s a universal truth about our staff, and we recognise that success looks different for each student.
Kylie Readman
The Global and Digital Growth program responds to global and national challenges such as geopolitical tensions and shifting international student regulations, setting new boundaries for continuous growth. These barriers to traditional enrolment models have prompted us to explore new educational communities and delivery methods.
It’s in this breakthrough space where we are facing many unknowns and uncertainties that lead to innovation. Our new “venture” launches a new product in a new market with a new partner and challenges our traditional offering as well as our curriculum delivery model. The program has adjacencies to UTS’s core learning and teaching strategy, with opportunities to offer alternative services to a new learner audience and source previously untapped educational communities to serve. The online offshore modality creates potential for scalability and exponential growth.
Partnering for student success
Addressing students’ needs and preferences are at the core of the new offerings’ education design, as Kerstin Schofer (Director, Global and Digital Education Innovation) explains:
In many global growth markets, demand exceeds supply, and students can’t enrol in the education of their choice. We want to enable access to a high-quality qualification for learners who are otherwise excluded from accelerating their career through further study. The transformative power of education is a key driver for social mobility and economic uplift overall. This means we focus on countries that have growing GDP’s and large and relatively young populations. In these countries, we look for trusted partners that share our values and goals and can help us support our online students in their culture, language and meet them where they are.
Kerstin Schofer
In partnership with CinLearn Education, UTS now offers 2 postgraduate online degrees in Mandarin. Collaborating with CinLearn ensures we understand the values, interests and needs of working professionals in China, but also amongst Chinese-speaking communities globally. These initial courses target the needs of working professionals who want to study in Mandarin and who are facing mobility barriers, so would otherwise not have access to a UTS qualification.
The strategy requires partnerships for on-the-ground expertise, but also what Kylie described as “getting our own house in order” with assessment criteria and institutional models to “act fast when the right opportunity arises.”
Open to opportunities
I hope that the sector has moved well beyond seeing online learning as a second choice, or as ‘less than’ because for me, it has as much potential to be as rich and engaging and satisfying as any other form of learning.
Kylie Readman
Following the successful launch of the UTS Online expansion with degrees in Chinese as a proof of concept, the university is now exploring new markets as well as partners for the online offshore modality and more broadly across various partnership types and delivery modes. Kylie described this as an “omnichannel approach” that supports flexibility and resilience in a rapidly changing environment. We look forward to sharing how this program develops and how UTS continues to expand as a global university in the new year.