Komosion continues its work with the University sector and is delighted to have interviewed Professor Anne Cummins, Deputy Vice Chancellor, Australian Catholic University, who is reshaping Teaching and Learning in response to the voice of the student.
Among many startling observations in this interview, she explains what is changing and why, after University, students may need to create their own jobs – not just seek them.
Having worked with Universities in the past and present on projects such as student journey mapping, Komosion’s first project was with ACU some years ago, whereby we helped ACU discover that its current way of communicating to students wasn’t working, and what we could implement to better engage students.
After completely revising all of its communications strategies, ACU now attunes its students to opportunities by its new digital channels of engagement, such as new online student portals. ACU’s new digital strategy aims to be continuously connected to its students, delivering relevant, important and timely information to them. As a result, ACU’s entrepreneurial approach is aligning with students, anticipating their needs and dismantling barriers like never before.
John: Few sectors have as much influence on our lives and the direction our lives might take as education. There seems to be a fairly new and urgent conversation taking place in agenda-setting government departments, boardrooms, and corridors of business: that education, more than ever before, is vital to the economy of the future and especially to the new jobs in the ever-expanding digital and sharing economies. It’s going to be vital to maintaining the standards of living that we Australians have long taken for granted. I’m very excited to be here with Professor Anne Cummins, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Students, Learning, and Teaching at the Australian Catholic University. Anne is going to share her thoughts and insights into the rapidly evolving education landscape. We’re sitting here in magnificent North Sydney. Anne, welcome to Komosion’s Customers Matter podcast series.
Anne: Thanks, John.
John: Anne, I’d like to start by understanding a little bit about your own background—where you grew up and where you were educated—by way of setting the scene for how you’ve come to be in such an influential and important role today.
Anne: I grew up in Sydney and have spent the better part of my life here, with several years in Canberra as well. I was educated by the Ursuline Sisters, who are a European order and had a very strong commitment to the education of girls in a holistic way—academically, spiritually, and culturally. I think that was a very good basis for me. My first degree was in education from what was then the Canberra College of Advanced Education, and later on, my studies were at Macquarie University and Boston College in the United States. I started my career as a primary school teacher and quickly found that you need to be much more skilled and creative than I was to be a successful primary school teacher, so I moved to secondary education where my skills were a better fit. I went through that process, becoming eventually a principal of a large school and then working at a systems level for a set of 54 schools. Then I worked for myself as a consultant for ten years, advising government welfare agencies, not-for-profits, and educational institutions on leadership and strategy. I accidentally came to the Australian Catholic University; it was an organisation I knew—I’d sat on their senate for a number of years—but I came when they were having a transition between one Vice-Chancellor and the next and I was here just to fill a gap. Then I applied for what was the newly created position of Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Students, Learning, and Teaching, and that finds me here.
John: Education’s been at the heart of your career, but clearly you had the benefit of being empowered as a young woman and being able to forge your way in a world that back in the day may not have been as career-oriented for many women, or wouldn’t have presented the opportunities that you’ve managed to achieve.
Anne: I think I was very fortunate. Only about a quarter of my cohort went from Year 10 to Year 11 in those days, so to get to matriculation was quite significant for girls at that time. I was fortunate I had a family that supported my education. But I didn’t go straight to university; I went to work. My first employer was Dun & Bradstreet, the mercantile agents. There I found out that there were some jobs I would be allowed to do in their organisation and some that I wouldn’t. At seventeen, I was outraged by that and left. I then joined a private company that went into publishing, and that was a good transition. But I did feel very much that I wanted to be a teacher, so I chose to go to university to study teaching.
John: You find yourself here at the Australian Catholic University. Could you tell me and the audience about the scale and breadth of the offering, and where ACU students come from? It really is much larger, more substantial, and more global in its orientation than people may realise.
Anne: We’re a university of 32,000 students. About twelve percent of those students are international, and they come from about eighty different countries around the world, many of them from countries like Nepal, Vietnam, and the Philippines. We have students in age groups from school leavers at eighteen or nineteen to very senior citizens, so our age profile is quite spread. Roughly seventy percent of our students are female because our disciplines are geared toward the industries where we have quite strong female participation: health, sciences, and teaching. We are a vocational university; we have seven campuses in Australia, a centre in Rome, and many international partnerships. We have eleven research institutes. Our mission is really to work for the dignity of the human person and to serve the common good of society. All of our courses, whether it be our law school, speech pathology, or early childhood teaching, are geared toward developing graduates who are distinctive in their concern for people and in their desire to be of service and to build a just and rich community.
John: So you’re educating people for purpose rather than profit?
Anne: Absolutely. While we’re keen for our students to have an entrepreneurial spirit and a real sense of their personal worth and their contribution, we also want them to be doing something that we think, as part of our mission, is very fulfilling: adding to the benefit of society.
John: Tell me a bit about your role. You mentioned that it was a newly created role when you came into it. What does it involve and why was it created?
Anne: My role was initiated in 2009 and was quite different from the rest of the sector; other universities have come to similar roles since. I think Professor Craven, our Vice-Chancellor at that time, was quite perceptive in that he wanted to have a portfolio within the university that supported the academic portfolio run by the provost, but that heard the student voice and injected it back into the learning and teaching of the university. In my portfolio, I have the Learning and Teaching Centre, which is an academic development unit for the academic staff. It’s a policy support unit for the Academic Board, it runs the e-learning capacity of the university, and it works on the scholarship of learning and teaching. It’s a thought leader about quality curriculum, quality learning and teaching, assessment, and evaluation.
John: It’s an extremely interesting proposition that students have a voice in the way learning is delivered. I’d like to understand more about how you get inside the minds and hearts of the students and translate those needs. We hear a lot about students as customers these days. I’m assuming universities see them more broadly than that, but could you explain how you’ve gone about grappling with that part of your mission?
Anne: ACU the university is twenty-five years old, but it rests on a 175-year tradition of training teachers and nurses. It’s always been a very student-focused institution, so in our DNA is a very strong partnership between our academic staff and our students and a strong sense of collegiality. Feedback is a normal part of that, but when you get to 32,000 students, you have to have systems for it as well. Every unit of study that a student undertakes has a short questionnaire at the end of it, which allows the student to reflect on the quality of the teaching and their learning experience, and to give us feedback about how things are going for them. We call that SELT, and that’s built into a lot of things at the university: course evaluations and renewals, individual academics’ promotion structures, and our planning frameworks. A lot of work is done to look at that data and to feed back to our students what the outcomes of their feedback are, so we close the loop. We’re getting a fifty-two percent return rate on that voluntary questionnaire; that’s an amazing rate, and I think that’s because students know that if they submit something, they’ll see a change made the next time they’re in that school or around the university.
John: Komosion came to know the Australian Catholic University some years ago when you recognised a communications challenge. There were only a handful of applicants for a very generous opportunity to study for a week in New York—expenses paid, accommodation provided—and it was open to hundreds. Why was that an important moment and what did it mean?
Anne: It was important for two reasons. It showed me that I was sending out a newsletter and no one was reading it, which was pretty dramatic. But it also showed me that students were not attuned to opportunity, and that we needed to get them to be attuned. As a result, we’ve had a complete revision of our communication strategies. The university is undergoing a major digital strategy at the moment, so our communication strategies are part of that. We’re building a new student portal and working with students to talk about the communication channels that are best for them. Students are connected all the time, but they’re not always in communication with us. They feel over-surveyed, they feel they get too much information they don’t want, and they feel it’s hard to sift through what’s important. They know I’m sneaky enough to put something in the middle of the newsletter and they may miss out if they don’t read it. I do that from time to time; every couple of months, I’ll sneak in a hundred movie passes and just see how quickly they pick them up. But we’re getting to have a deeper sharing of what they want, and we’re beginning to personalise our communication tools so they can drive what they’re hearing from us.
John: That means you’ve come to understand the student journey and you’re looking to better align with and anticipate the ways in which students might expect to be communicated with?
Anne: We’re definitely doing that, looking at students before they come, as they’re entering the university, and taking out the barriers. We found that some of our online enrolment processes were very complex, so we’re streamlining their access to tutorials and then provoking them with information just in time for the things they might need. Since it is exam time, we’re about to tell them about last-minute exam preparation, and we will alert them to what’s available over the summer vacation shortly.
John: It’s almost like you’re handing a cold glass of water just before someone realises they were thirsty?
Anne: Yes, we are trying to.
John: What has the digital economy meant for the process of teaching and learning, and how is that changing practices?
Anne: Students expect to have access to the university through their phones wherever they are and at whatever time. It has several positive impacts. For example, our library service is highly accessible. Once upon a time, you needed to be in the library physically. Our libraries are still crowded with students because they’re nice places to be and it’s a social milieu, but they can access the same kind of help digitally now. They can even do simple things like request books and pick them up when they come on campus. That kind of change is radical. The electronic classroom, what we call LEO (Learning Environment Online), is much more important to students now. Everything filters through it: assignments are uploaded, marked, and returned. Those transactions that used to be quite cumbersome—like catching a train to put your assignment in the box outside the lecturer’s door by five o’clock—are a thing of the past. We’re very much in the digital space for those transactions now. We also have access to much richer and varied information, content material, and simulations. You can do things in simulations that you might have had to do in a lab or a placement external to the university; we’ve never had access to that before. The other thing is that students can be more self-directed in how they use the curriculum, which is a challenge to the traditional model where students pace themselves at the speed we present. They can now access materials from units they’re not doing, or they might only want to do part of a unit. We’re having to look for new ways to develop our courses. We have a project in the MBA programme to badge components so that you get a certification for achieving specific things; it may add up to an MBA in time, but you don’t have to follow the track we prescribe in the first instance.
John: Does that suggest you could even do your degree more quickly than previously? Is it more flexible?
Anne: Absolutely; it’s more flexible and fits with what people are doing in their lives. While many students would like to complete their degrees more quickly, and there are benefits in that, I am actually a proponent of acceleration where you still have time to digest, reflect on, and integrate learning. It’s not just about stepping through assessments; it’s about walking the journey of having an education. There is a balancing act that we advise students on.
John: What has the digital economy meant for the classroom experience and how it’s changed?
Anne: I think it’s raised students’ expectations that what happens in their classrooms will be more engaging and sometimes even more entertaining. The distance between a traditional lecture and “infotainment” or a documentary experience—where we’re fully engaged and enjoying the learning—has narrowed. They’re expecting to be more interactive, to have more say in the process, and to see different resources used. The biggest critique we get is that our technology is not used extensively enough or well enough. Up-skilling our academic staff in that regard is a major project.
John: Politicians have made innovation a centrepiece of the future of the Australian economy. What might this mean for education and how innovation driven here might benefit the broader economy?
Anne: For a university like this, where most of our degrees lead to professional accreditation required for practice as an occupational therapist, lawyer, or nurse, we’re constrained in some ways by accreditation authorities. Innovation requires free space for people to experiment, so there’s a tension in getting people to accreditation while developing an innovative and entrepreneurial spirit. That said, those very professions need people who are innovators and who can think differently to face disruptive changes. The tension for us is to provide students with an education that gets them past the first barrier—professional accreditation—but also gives them the skills to build a career in a rapidly changing environment.
John: How do you do that?
Anne: Partly it’s about the pedagogies you choose. We often choose a problem-solving pedagogy, such as problem-based learning, design thinking, or collaborative processes rather than just straight competency building. We also choose to have a co-curriculum that supports our curriculum. For instance, we’ve just had fifty or sixty students working on entrepreneurial skills in a programme called Interchange. That’s a design thinking course where they set up small companies, do their pitch, and see if they can get funding. We also assist students who come to university less prepared and perhaps needing more polish on presentation skills. We do a lot of work on public speaking and have Toastmasters on all our campuses. We encourage our teachers to have another string to their bow, such as learning the guitar or a sport—something that enriches their offer besides the academic programme.
John: You mentioned equitable opportunities for people from countries like Nepal and the Philippines. How do you go about understanding their needs?
Anne: We invest heavily in our international office and student support services to ensure those students have a good experience and become friends with domestic students. We keep the international cohort at around twelve percent and spread across eighty countries because if most students come from one country, their English doesn’t develop and they don’t get an Australian experience. Peer support is really strong.
John: You mentioned the campus in Rome and the university’s faith base. How does the faith base differentiate ACU?
Anne: Australia is a very secular country, and Catholic universities are an oddity in our system. ACU is a public and Catholic university, which is increasingly odd here, but we stand in a tradition of Catholic universities around the world, where there are sixteen million students. Differentiation comes from core mission values: the dignity of the human person and transformative education for the common good.
John: What do you see as the education and career sectors of the future, and how is ACU coding for changes in work over time?
Anne: We think about this a lot because our big offer is a professional education leading to employment. Many of our students are the first in their family at university and are concerned about getting a job. We think education is more than getting a job, and while we’re preparing them for the careers they go into at the end of their degrees, we don’t want them to think that will be the end of their choices.
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John: In terms of the education and career sectors of the future, you mentioned that you’re training people for more than just a job—to contribute more holistically over time—and that you don’t see learning as something that is only done once?
Anne: I think it’s very important that students learn how to learn, that they learn to love learning, and that they realise they have a responsibility to keep learning. We would be very disappointed in a graduate who thought, “I’ve got my degree now; I’ve made it.” Instead, we think of it as an entry qualification to your life; it is not the end of that journey. In terms of the jobs of the future, I think there are roles emerging where the digital agenda is pushing a type of work that requires a specific set of skills. To me, those skills seem to be focused on communication and many of the soft skills we teach, because we prepare people for professions that work directly with others. We are very keen on those soft skills: the ability to negotiate, to facilitate, to persuade, and to influence.
I think there will be many “knowledge jobs” focused in those areas. There certainly will also be jobs that require deeper and more focused science, maths, and technology. The STEM agenda is highly relevant to all of our professions, whether our students are in the health sciences, law, business, or education. While those jobs will continue to emerge, there is a “grey spot” where we don’t yet know what those roles will look like. Even more than that, we don’t know how those jobs will be cast; they won’t necessarily be situated within the institutional employment frameworks we currently have. Therefore, our students need to know that, at some point in their lives, they might need to depend on themselves to be job creators, not just job seekers.
John: That is very interesting. Thinking about that, how do you think the student experience will be different in, say, ten years’ time?
Anne: I think some of the current trends will continue. Students will increasingly want flexibility, but they also want the campus experience and the collegial experience with fellow students and faculty. I believe education will continue to become increasingly internationalised. We see that already, as most of our students now look for some kind of international experience, whether it is a curriculum-based experience or, more often, an offshore experience.
I also think the barrier between work and study will diminish. Students will look for programmes where they actually train in the workplace. We are looking at new ways of educational delivery; for instance, we have clinical skills training at all the major hospitals. If you are doing one of our health sciences courses, you may well spend more of your time at the hospital than you do here on campus. Likewise, we are teaching education programmes inside schools. I think that barrier between where you are going and where you are now will become much more permeable.
John: Finally, thinking about the age of digital disruption—the age of the customer and all these titles the current era carries—what are your top three tips for universities to not just survive, but thrive in this age of disruption?
Anne: First, listen to the students. I think students have an intuitive understanding of where the world is going and what their place in it will be. We sometimes have to put aside the assumptions we carry from our own socialisation, observe their experience, and let them help us understand it.
Second, listen to the employers and the stakeholders who will be working with the students when they leave us. If the students are not a good fit for those expectations, they will have great difficulty getting to where they want to be.
The third tip is to be brave. Don’t let assumptions about the way things have always been done force you into avoiding the changes you need to make.
John: Professor Anne Cummins, thank you very much.
Anne: Thanks, John.