This is the transcript for the video Bachelor of Creative Intelligence & Innovation/Diploma in Innovation webinar for parents
0:00
Fantastic. Okay, we’re ready to start. Let’s go. Welcome to the Bachelor of creative intelligence and innovation and the Diploma in innovation at UTS. I’d like to acknowledge the Cadigal people of the Eora nation upon whose ancestral lands, our City Campus now stands, I would also like to pay respect to the elders both past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for this land. Welcome again. So you’re in the introduction to the Bachelor of creative intelligence and innovation for parents, but I understand that there’s some students here, so I’ll try and make it as broad as possible. And we’re going to take you through a little bit of the process, a little bit of a journey into what it feels like to be a student and also what it feels like from a parent perspective. And just as a heads up, we’re recording I hope that’s okay for everybody else who is present and these recordings are going to become available for other people who can’t attend. And there’s also many recordings on the website that you can go to later. So there’s also some information here on how to use zoom. And which is, let me just take you here. So you ask questions, and you’re encouraged to ask questions throughout. We can make it quite conversational. At the bottom of your zoom bar, for those of you who haven’t experienced the zoom webinar, there’s this question and answer button, just pop your question in there, and then we’ll have something to work from. Also, it’s worth mentioning that we have these upcoming events where you can chat one on one with our students, or academics. So just take a little look at those.
2:01
So who are we? And what are we about to look at? So I’m, Bem Le Hunte I am an Associate Professor, and I’m the founding course director of the Bachelor of creative intelligence and innovation. I don’t usually talk too much about myself in student sessions. But sometimes parents are interested in who the teachers are, what gives them the authority to teach and where they come from. So a bit about me, I from a creative industries background. I’ve spent 30, you know, three decades in Creative Industries. But I’ve also studied my first two degrees in social anthropology at Cambridge, and I had the best education in the world. And my feeling is I want to create that same incredible education for our students. The same high quality, the same transformational feeling because that experience really kind of rocked my world. So as well as that I’ve been a novelist, and I’m also a teacher now. So I bring together creativity across disciplines, and a combination of them. So they’re multiple intelligences. And we call this creative intelligence. Significantly for this session, I’m also a parent myself, a parent of three children, and I’ve been involved in their choices from the get go. I’ve currently got a year eight student who is making decisions about future subjects to study and I’ve had one current student doing a bachelor’s, and I have another child who’s completed their degree and looking at post grad options. So I completely understand this stage of trying to understand exactly what the options are. And I wanted to talk a little bit from the parent perspective. So often our kids don’t know what they want to learn. I think that the students in the audience, a typical Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation students wants to do everything. They don’t want to limit their options. They don’t want to shut down their options, they want to open them up. And that kind of suits the sort of profile of students that we get with BCII. We’re trying to create t-shaped graduate that’s with a long bar that has a core disciplinary strength because our degree combines with 25 disciplines and also that breath at the top so that’s who we are. One child for example of mine is a scientist. He studied science but now he’s discovering data science, he might in the future end up outside of healthcare in industry he might end up in, in any number of careers might even end up in education. So the typical journey of the student today is to go through let’s say, well, the foundation for Young Australian says 17 different jobs across five completely different fields. So he could end up in any kind of occupation during the course of a lifetime of work. What we know is that our kids are often influenced by what was impressive for parents in their generation. So let’s say when I was younger the top professions were law and medicine, and that might still be considered to be the case by some parents today, but everything is changing. And that’s not necessarily where the places are in the demands are now. So a big rethink is happening. And a lot of parents are wanting to think about future proofing their children’s degrees. And what we’ll talk about in this session is how you can do that and how these offerings the Diploma in Innovation, and the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation actually helps to diversify what’s possible and future proof what would otherwise be a singular degree. Other things that parents want, we want kids to do things that inspire them to be their best, what we’re finding with BCII, is that the students really have this transformative journey. And they end up being incredibly independent thinkers. Another thing that a parent would want independent, financially independent thinkers, and we want them to be fulfilled. And one of the things that we know about this degree and the diploma is that we have extraordinary student feedback and a real sense of kind of appreciation for the journey that they’ve been through. And that’s also echoed through three awards that we’ve won. And based on the evidence that we’ve shown various awards committees on this particular trait, the incredible industry partnerships that students have, we all want our kids to have jobs at the end we want them to, especially in this uncertain world. And so we’re very fortunate that we’ve had like a 92% employment rate in BCII. That’s extraordinary by national and international standards. One of the reasons why we’ve won international and national awards. We want them to have good friends and good networks, and one of the incredible things that happens with BCII is that it is a club that no one wants to leave.
7:36
It’s one of those sort of networks that you stay connected. We know our alumni, we know our students, the students know each other. They work in teams, collaborative teams across four years of a degree so they have a really good understanding of what each other’s capabilities are. And they love working together. The teams work gets extraordinary feedback. And it’s not necessarily the case in students core degrees. So Incredible values all of that happening together.
8:15
Let me take you just really briefly into what this degree entails what it’s about. So this is a DNA drawing of the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation. You can see those faculties at the top the Arts and Social Sciences, FASS, Business, Design Architecture Building, Engineering, Information Technology, Health, Law, Science. We draw students from all 25 degrees across these seven faculties and we create this accelerated degree so most degrees that are combined are five years but this is four years because we’re doing intensive in the fourth year and we combine through summer and winter schools throughout. So how does that look, really quick background to what that looks like. So here’s your four year degree. In year one, you’ll see the blue six credit points subjects, you’ll be doing four of those, probably in a semester, a session. And then at the end of your first session, session one, you’ll arrive at the Winter school, your first winter school problems to possibilities, which is an 8 credit point subject delivered in intensive block mode. That means over two weeks, pretty much full time, really intensive, very high powered boot camps. Fast, furious, inspirational. And that’s where this sort of corroboree of all the different disciplines come together that first school you make your friends in advance. Talking about networks, you’re networking even in advance, we have briefs to keep the cohort connected even before that school starts like a dinner party brief where you meet your cohort you come with friends. The second session, you’ll continue with those six credit points in your core degree. And then you’ll do a subject at the end called ‘Creative Practice and Methods’ and that’s your summer school again, two weeks intensive mode. And that pattern repeats for year one, year two, year three, you can see on those three rows. By then most students, depending on their core degree have finished their core degree except potentially with engineering. In the fourth year, we run a full time immersive degree. Starts off with incredible innovation internship opportunities, more recently with a reduced number of internships available because of COVID and shutdowns in some of the organisations, we’ve had an extraordinary amount of support from our industry partners. We’ve had 60 live briefs running, including a professional immersion programme where students actually get the experience of being hired by these organisations from Deloitte to regional development Australia who ran two big streams, for example, and they’ll get on boarded, they’ll get a wonderful experience working on some real life briefs as well. So that will be a sort of internship experience that starts that fourth year. And throughout the fourth year, they’ll also run their own industry projects, and they do industry projects from the very first school onwards, a lot of degrees, you get to do work with industry, maybe as an honour student, or as a master student or a post grad of some sort, or maybe in your third year of your bachelor’s if you’re lucky. Our students work with our industry partners and there are 700 of them by the way they work with them from the get go because we have voracious industry appetite for our students. Hence the great employment opportunities. In fact, around 42% of our students get employed by our Industry Partners, because they’re working with them, they see how good they are, they say are you available for a job. So that’s essentially how it works. And just really quickly ‘Problems to Possibilities’ is all about exploring, cutting edge ideas from the, the cutting edges of our disciplines and how they combine. So we explore an ideas arena there, for example. And we have like, over 50 methods that students use from cross disciplines in that particular subject. ‘Creative Practice and Methods they’ll again, go into a methods arena where they explore many methods from across and invent their own and create their own and mash them up and create this kind of method sandpit where they get set for the rest of the fourth year with an extraordinary set of tools that they use and reuse. ‘Past Present Future of Innovation’, second year subject is all about disruption, innovation, understanding the future of our fields, and we have a futures arena where we explore that. ‘Creativity and complexity’, we look at creativity in the context of nudges in systems that we can create and creative interventions in complex systems. So we do a lot of systems thinking, we look at sector economies, we look at the many wicked problems of our time and feature base to and we work on them and show students some approaches, and philosophical stances on those. Then we move into our third year, which is all about leading innovation. We really believe our students are future leaders, and then they do this initiatives in entrepreneurship subject where they design their own start-ups, and that can become a stream because in fourth year, we have four streams. One is the entrepreneurial stream, the industry changemakers stream, and that industry innovation project every student does that where they work on their own industry partnership projects. And then we have the serial entrepreneurship stream where you can develop your own entrepreneurial concept. And you can launch your career with it at the end of that fourth year, and we’ve had students who’ve done that. We’ve had students go to Silicon Valley and get amazing funding and do that even. So the third stream is a Changemaker stream, which is if you’re really interested in systems change and how to create that, that’s a great stream and then a new knowledge making stream where we also give our students the opportunity to do an incredible honours project. We’ve had some awesome ones we’ve had this only available for the last year but the projects give you a kickstart into funding and places in higher degree research. So if you want to do a PhD straight after a Master’s, you can go straight into a PhD with an honours with a first class honours, and have to say out of our honours students last year, all but one got a first class honours. So it was an amazing opportunity to explore that world of research. Apart from that fourth year is all about making connections, making networks, they do a professional practice at the cutting edge subject, they have an opportunity to do yet another internship if they want they have subjects like ‘Envisioning Futures’ and the honours, like I mentioned, also creative intelligence Capstone where they get to design their own project. So I’ll give you an opportunity to ask questions at the end about all of that, that I’ve just talked about. But and we’ll also Martin and I talk about jobs of the future, in an interactive session at the end, but at this point, I’d like to hand over to Associate Professor Martin Bliemel who will take us through the Diploma in Innovation and also talk about pathways into BCII. Because lots of the questions we get at open day are about getting the ATAR. And, will I will I not get the ATAR for BCII. And it’s always harder to get into BCII than the core degree. And so always put your BCII combination preference as the top choice. And if you don’t get that then put the core degree that you want to do standalone as your second choice. And you can get into your, if you don’t get the ATAR you get into your second choice, you joined the Diploma in Innovation, you do well in that and you can join BCII in the second year, or you can continue with a Diploma in Innovation as a standalone qualification. So that’s about it for me for now. I’ll be back at the end for questions and handing over to you Martin.
17:00
Fantastic, thank you so much. Hi everyone, Ill follow Bem’s lead here to tell you a bit more about myself and how we teach things. It’s less about the content but also understand the role of the teacher and the programme the design and development. Part of my background was mechanical engineering, so pretty quant heavy. But one thing that stood out while I was doing my degree were all the apprenticeships. So I worked on the assembly line, I worked for a fleece manufacturer, worked for a large telecom company, during my engineering degree that really, really kind of brought it to life so that that real experience of applying that knowledge makes that education so much more valuable. And that’s the experience that we’re embedding within a lot of our programmes. So this is I guess these are real authentic learning experiences that we’re providing to students basically what we wish we had when we were our younger self. Off the back of that started getting into start-ups. while I worked as a mechanical engineer first and realised, you know, there’s a lot more to it than just tech and solving the technical aspects of a problem, but there’s a whole organisation whole environment around you that the organisation needs to explore. So going into start-ups helped engineers, scientists, technologists, launch their companies, and got into incubation, to really try and understand the whole world around technology and the impact it has on society and helping people figure out how to take their technical ideas and move them forward. And so thinking about moving things forward in a very complex or networked environment is something that’s come through and a lot of the programme design that we’ve got here. So let me tell you about the Diploma itself. As Bem mentioned, do feel free to go into that Q&A button at the bottom and drop some questions in there where we can we’ll answer them live, but we can always answer them at the end. We do want to give as much time as possible for this to be Q&A dialogue. So the Diploma, don’t let the word deployment remind you of something that’s an entry pathway into bachelor’s degree like a cert or diploma, as a pathway to a degree. In this case, the word diploma merely means 48 credit points versus a second bachelor’s degree, which is 96 credit points or a core Bachelor’s degree, which is 144 credit points. And it’s really just kind of a volume of learning. The diploma is designed at the same quality as the BCII, it’s same qualities as some, like really amazing undergraduate programmes that add value to your core degree. So that’s really the name diploma. It really is broadly about innovation. So technology, innovation, social innovation, environmental innovation, clean tech innovation, it’s all in there. But the main emphasis is it adds value. So you come here for any core degree and on top of that core degree, simultaneous to the core degree, you can do the diploma. So you can start the same day, you can finish the same day and you can walk away with two qualifications, one, which is that very deep shape in the T and the other that provides that depth. And the diploma and the BCII complements really quite nicely, but they’re also some differentiating factors. So one of them is that the diploma is half creative intelligence. So this is this idea of under really understanding the problem spaces, and the methods by which you can explore really complex wicked network problems. And I’m sure we can explain what that means during the Q&A too. But also then pairs it with the entrepreneurial side to say okay, how exactly do you find your place in our system? How do you innovate? How do you start a company? How do you start your initiative within this really complex environment. Some people find a complex systems really daunting and don’t know where to start. So we try and push people to really say, Okay, here’s the spot for you to start operating within the system and start changing it for the better. All our subjects run in the summers and winters as well. So in our case, they run in three week intensives instead of two week intensives. So they run in July, and November, December and in February. And because they run three weeks and two days a week, if you really want to, you can take the diploma subject in an accelerated timeframe. So you can take one on one of them runs on Mondays and Thursdays and the other one on Tuesdays and Fridays. So if you want you can double up on the intensives and take an accelerated path through the diploma and still graduate on time with your core degree as well. And lastly is it is a pathway to BCII.
21:43
I can see the graphic in the background. Here’s is the core structure of the diploma, the how you’ve got the core degree, and then the individual subjects start in the Summers and Winter. The first two recommended subjects in the diploma are directly analogous to the BCII. So if you don’t get into the BCII, you can still get into your core degree add the diploma take the first two creative intelligence subjects directly analogous to the BCII and transfer across. After that the diploma takes on a different flavour of emphasising more on the entrepreneur side with unique subjects around intrapreneur ecosystems and portfolios or platforms of opportunities to, to not to pursue one opportunity, but entire suites of opportunities built on a platform.
22:34
A lot of this a lot of the designs of other programmes are fundamentally on what we call transversal capabilities. Our graduate attributes are ones that are portable across careers. So you can do your core degree and that one deep discipline but those soft skills, those professional skills that come across the top of them, those are the ones that come across that are portable from career to career. As you see this in these echo a lot of the future of jobs reports to where some of the top skills are really the human skills, the ones that can’t be automated away. And so like the ability to innovate, to think critically, but also to collaborate across disciplines. So this question from Simon, “what are the time requirements required to be successful in the diploma”? The diploma can be taken in those three week bites in July, and in November, December or in February. So you get the bulk of your summer. And you also get a significant chunk of your winter break, so that you can do the diploma at the same time and finish at the same time as your core degree. And so you’re really you’re just giving up three weeks here and there in the winter and in the summer breaks. But it’s almost not even so much giving up. A lot of the students actually come to the classes because they find that they’re really, really interesting in terms of the concepts in terms of industry partners that they meet, and also in terms of the students. They get to meet students who are across a huge variety of disciplines. So it’s actually a joy for them to come back and learn from their peers, and exchange ideas and exchange concepts and knowledge across their core degrees. So this one can if you really want you can do in two years, it’s designed to be done in three years, maybe you can stretch it to four years. Sorry, on that note, it’s also compatible with a double degree. So you can do a double degree plus the diploma as well. And all of which goes to say, like having your disciplinary capabilities and these transdisciplinary capabilities, this is all designed to help you stand out from the crowd. So a lot of the reports are showing that and we see it with the people who we bring in as industry partners, who then recruit our students, that these skills are exactly what employers are looking for. These are the ones that co-founders are looking for from companies that these will help your students or your children really stand out amongst the crowd. There could be 1000 other engineering graduates out there, but what really makes them found out is that they’re not just good at engineering, but amazing to collaborate with. And amazing at problem solving beyond just the technical problems solving. All of which goes to say they’re ready for the real world. So this comes back to making sure that what we teach them isn’t as relevant but they’re learning it in a very authentic way. So we give them real problems by the industry partners for them to work on. And it’s, it’s really fun to almost more facilitate this experience for students rather than teach it to students, because the industry partners are learning from the students while the students are learning from each other and from the industry partner as well. So takes a particular breed of university and particular breed of educators to really facilitate this quite complex process. Bem’s already mentioned the BCII itself has won a couple awards. Pretty much everyone on our staff I think now has won a teaching award of some sort, local, national, international. The students are in amazing hands with us. But we did really want to make this available as a Q&A and a live discussion. So please do jump into the Q&A and throw us any questions that you have. There’s no such thing as a dumb question, they are all good questions. If you have the question on your mind, chances are somebody else has it too. There’s, I mean, there’s so many things that you could be asking about. I’ll stop the screenshare. I just want this to be more of a dialogue more about us. So that we can talk and where we can we’ll also throw some of the questions and answers in the chat too, if particularly if they’re hyperlinks involved.
26:46
So Simon, I hope I’ve answered your question. And Bem maybe you’d like to, minor interrogation here. So what is a wicked problem? And what is a wicked problem that’s worth solving.
27:02
So yes, so the wicked problems of our time are, we’re living through one. I mean, one of the things that’s very, you know, timely about a degree like this is that we can address what’s happening as it’s happening. So for example, in our subject ‘Creativity and Complexity’ this year, second year BCII subject, we tackled the bushfires. We looked at the bushfires as a complex system, I imagine that will do the COVID-19 challenge. It seems like an obvious one because we’re living through it. It’s a very real one. So how might transdisciplinarity work in this context? So let’s think about you know, all of the, we’ve had our scientists working day and night to try and find solutions and analyse the science of the virus. We’ve had psychology looking at this problem of separation, how we tackle that, we’ve had you know, people at narrative people Arundhati Roy, think Arundhati Roy writing about the power of narratives and new narratives at this time, we’ve had businesses tackling the financial crisis of this time and how to get out of it. So you’re getting this pitch at the sociologists, cultural theorists, looking at the artefacts of our time and looking at how we can tackle this together. Imagine having all of those people in one room together to work on the challenge, not in their silos, but from an integrated perspective. And then imagine a kind of transformation that doesn’t just look at research out there and the impact we’re having out there, but brings us as researchers as thinkers into the space. So we’re implicated, no person is in Island, we’re all connected. And I think that wicked problems they’re called, or complex challenges, they implicate all of us. And understanding the nuances, the subtlety, the connectedness, is what our students do really brilliantly by the end of it and collaboration, they know how to collaborate by the end of it, which gives them this kind of edge. Because in the interviewing process, the jobs all of our students who’ve gone through those top tier interviews, by the fifth stage of those interviews, you’re put through a process where you have to solve a problem with your peers and you have to demonstrate leadership, you have to demonstrate that you can think differently. Well, our students have been doing this from year one, walk through that phase. And it’s very easy to demonstrate that kind of leadership because they’ve got that complex, problem solving piece in place.
29:55
There’s a good question here “Am I right in thinking the course covers practical work where student groups are given a problem statement for them to work on and ideate and actual potential outcomes, what forms do the end products of their work take?” Just one thing right off the bat is there are no exams in our faculty, we’re not assessing on knowledge, we’re assessing on capabilities. So you really do have to, I guess, we see what happens in the classroom for whether it’s virtual or face to face. So we’re seeing the behaviours see the behavioural change and seeing the actions taken. And through that, that reflects on the attitude change, your ability to communicate change. And then this often gets encapsulated in some sort of artefact at the end that students can use as part of their portfolio. So it’s much more about just doing practical work. It’s really about developing the capabilities, which then are reflected in these artefacts, which kind of comes to your question of like, what did the end products look like? There’s a huge range of these. Bem, what are your some of your favourites?
31:03
So I’ll give you a few examples of some briefs that student, there’s a question about internships as well. I loved, so I’ll give you some of my favourite schools that I’ve run one project that students got to work, one of the first ever ones that they worked on was a Google challenge, which is millions of people in the Asia Pacific region coming onto the internet for the first time. What does their first kiss look like? So they’re working with Google on that, or SBS with zenith media? What might, how might we triple the digital consumption of SBS? And what was super cool about that was that students came up with such great ideas that they were given internships, there was a questionnaire about internships, what kind of work students are doing, they were given internships and asked to look at kind of like a kind of millennial lab because there aren’t many millennials watching SBS, it’s not their target market. So they got to think through that really carefully. And they have worked on projects with the Australian military that are so top secret that they were being flown around by helicopter to present their ideas around systems change to admirals. In various campuses. They’ve worked a lot with the big four kind of consultancies, like they’ve done, two major projects, for example, with Accenture, one on making Australia safer, because there are lots of clients in that space for Accenture, another one on a smart cities challenge, which Accenture we’re involved in quite heavily. So the difference with our students is okay, so if they were going to be involved with an Accenture Smart City challenge, they’ve got a seasoned professional on a cost code working with them. With the making Australia safer challenge, they got to go into Accenture and had breakfast lunch and dinner and work with their consultants and workshop their ideas with big players in that field. So these are the sorts of opportunities students get. All of these briefs I should say, kind of, we do a lot of hand holding for the first three years because kids have come straight from high school, it’s hard. So we acclimatize them slowly to that professional kind of confidence and creative confidence which is major to tackle a challenge, a creative brief an industry project, or a self-initiated project themselves by fourth year. So we’ll do all the taking of a brief and we pass it on to students all the way through the first three years. By the fourth year they’re managing everything themselves. So they work with start-ups too. They have the opportunity to work with start-ups they have an opportunity to work with, who else, innovation consultancies are really keen to snap up our students and to learn from some of the methods they’ve learned because they’re methods that they don’t use themselves. And I remember one of our clients going my goodness, I’ve never seen a systems tear down in all my years in the fashion industry before. And the choice of industries is another major thing worth pointing out from, from consultancies to all the major banks to start-ups to one of our really close industry partners is the Centre for Inclusive Design. So you can do the social impact, you can do the corporate, you can do the all kinds of changemaking depending what you’re interested in.
34:58
Martin, I’m going to pull up His projects while I’m waiting to rattle off some industry partners that students have been working closely.
35:09
I’ve been just reflecting on one of the latest July schools, we had Georges River Council, Sutherland Shire, Bayside, Wollongong, regional development Australia, Illawarra Regional Developments Australia, Sydney all working together to say what can we do that would in covid times really bring each of these councils and these areas to life and also bring the southern Sydney ecosystem to life in a way that sort of matches what we’re seeing with a lot of the state investment happening in the CBD or Western Sydney. And one thing that was really refreshing for the students to understand is that a lot of the people whose day job it is to try and figure this out actually don’t really have the professional training to negotiate such complex wicked problems either a lot of them have come into such situations through more conventional degrees and educational pathways. So, in the beginning, particularly for the first year students, it’s a little bit daunting for them to realise, oh my god, these briefs are a little uncertain. They’re relatively poorly specified. I want to impress the industry partner. And it’s wonderful to see them, I guess, realising that they’re not in this alone, a lot of the industry partners, know, or , I don’t want to say know just as a little bit, they’re just as uncertain about what the pathways forward are as the students themselves. So there’s this really fun, I guess, balancing of how to deal with the uncertainty. And in the earlier programmes, and the earlier parts of the degree, we do try and curate the industry briefs we give them so that they’re, I guess they’re somewhat manageable and real well designed. The interesting part is, as the students get more and more experienced with these complex briefs, they can often flip them around and say, well actually, what you’re asking us to do is only one way to look at the problem. Let’s look at it from a totally different perspective. They re brief the problem back to the industry partner, they generate this huge confidence to understand the complexity of the system faster than the person pitching the problem to them.
37:26
Can I answer a couple of questions coming in? The first one is, “Am I right in thinking that the course covers practical work where student groups are given a problem statements then to work on an idea to action potential outcomes”? I wanted to speak to the whole idea of practical work, we deal with something, we call these authentic assessments in learning and teaching. So what happens is that we don’t actually get students to write a 5000 page essay like other courses might. That’s not what we’re testing on. Like we don’t test on exams. We test on live briefs, real challenges and learning capabilities that are required, I guess for the new world of work. Which is why it’s such a future thinking degree. So yes, these authentic assessments, real world authentic assessments. The students absolutely love them. And also, they’re more fun. They’re more fun and less stressful. People aren’t having to talk to themselves writing a long essay overnight when they might actually be doing a kind of a systems map or they might be demonstrating some sort of value proposition and so on. And one of the questions here is do you cover more traditional methodologies such as six sigma, lean, etc. We’re not teaching a business degree; a lot of those practices are taught in business degrees and students have access to them. But you know what? We’ve had people like the person who wrote the agile, lead the Agile Manifesto, Alistair Coburn come and teach our students, for example, and we will teach them agile and we will teach them, we’ve had people come along and teach Scrum for the day, for example, Scrum trainers. But what we’re doing is more unique than that, far more unique. So if you think there’s a very famous Stanford school called the D school, that’s design thinking, we do so much more than design thinking. Design Thinking is a single discipline kind of imposing itself on another discipline. It’s not transdisciplinarity in the sense that our practices are far more emergent, if you like it, they emerge from the practice that we’re taking our students through, and we get students we introduce them to all these methods, but we also get them to invent their own methods, right. Because we don’t want them to all play in the same way we want every student to graduate differently. So how do we create that we give them freedom to become those producers of knowledge, not the consumers of knowledge. So yes, they can do traditional design thinking but a typical BCII students will kind of knock the socks off for you by showing you what else they know. I hope I answered that.
40:30
Just to add to that we do touch on it in the odd workshop, we won’t have like a whole subject dedicated to like just the Lean Start-up like how clear this is in the background. But this subject here, this kind of the, the second entrepreneurship subject right around here is intrapreneur experimenting and innovation validation. So that covers some of the lean method, but it covers a whole variety of other methods through which you can really entrepreneurial experiment your way forward to probe and test your way through a system. So we’ll touch on that. But the other thing is at UTS, we also have UTS start-ups. So we have like 500 start-ups or more now, that is supported by the university in a co-curricular format. So they also run some workshops that will cover a lot more of these traditional methods. So if you want to learn about customer journey mapping, minimum viable product, canvases or value proposition design canvases, you can also get that through them as well. And there are close relationships between us and them that can help reinforce that.
41:40
Thanks for the feedback on the. Caroline’s asked “How do students find the workload in the BCII when combined with another degree”? That’s a really interesting question because I think Martin touched on it with okay, so our students are doing two extra weeks in their summer holidays and two extra weeks in their winter holidays. And if they’re doing a BCII or a diploma in innovation, what does that add? I mean, if you consider that a semester is 12 weeks long, and that’s 24 weeks over the year, and give or take a couple of extra weeks for exams with some degrees. You’re adding four weeks extra for the first three years. So is it an extra workload? Well you’re taking away from your holiday, but one thing Martin mentioned is a lot of our students look forward to that being together again, with their friends from across all other faculties because it’s a wildly sociable kind of process. It’s a true inter university degree. And so, yeah, that’s a wonderful thing that they look forward to. But we generally advise for those two weeks students don’t do any work outside of Uni, unless it’s the weekend because their intensive block mode. If you think about it, adding only four weeks a year for the first three years, that’s nothing to get a double degree. And they find the workload really intense when it’s happening for those two weeks, because they put so much into it. Our students are really high achievers, they work so hard, and that’s what makes them so brilliant. And that’s what gives them the confidence.
43:33
I’ll be totally honest, like I was at another university for eight years before coming to FTDI soon to be rebranded to TD School coming to 2021 and it was a shift to teach from a 12 week mode to a three week or two week mode, and I’ll be honest, that I was a bit sceptical, like how much can students possibly learn and achieve in such a short period of time and frankly, they nail it. It’s just that dedication and focus that you put everything else aside, and the energy and the feedback among students to really absorb what’s I mean, what’s in the environment between the peer learning and the guest speakers learning or learning from the Industry partners. It’s amazing what they can achieve in two weeks or three weeks.
44:20
Kylie has asked “What kind of work are students doing in the internships”? And one of the things that we have a really complex system that all of our industry partners have to go through, they have to tell us what kind of internships they offer, what kind of what kind of industry projects they’re offering, and it’s a proper questionnaire they get. We don’t send our students out to make coffee. And generally our industry partners understand the value of our students and they’re specifically seeking them out. So no, they don’t do kind of the usual internship. So we look at the internships within the innovation ecosystem, and we’re very well networked into that because of our, we have a brilliant industry partnerships team that curates all of that experience for us within our faculty. I hope I’ve answered that question.
45:16
So currently some of the internship questions are a little anxiety about where are the jobs going, or who is even taking, or got the capacity to take on an internship. Part of that, I don’t want to promise COVID will go away in the next two years, but if you’re starting University now, by the time you worry about internship three years from now, the landscape will have completely shifted. A lot of the work the students are doing now I mean, this remote learning environment is actually setting you up to be at the forefront of how to collaborate online. So it is actually quite in line with the way a lot of sectors are heading as they figured out how to work in a more globally networked remote team setup.
46:01
Yeah, that a really good point, it will end, I think it will end. But another thing worth mentioning is that we have had for some of our subjects, even higher student feedback, since we’ve been online, I find that just outstanding. We’ve discovered all these great online collaborative tools. We’ve got an incredible learning management system that we transition to an emergency mode, which is working really well for asynchronous learning, that we’re able to upload stuff that students can do in their own time. And we’re going to be able to connect our curriculum in beautiful ways in the future. I’m quite excited about what the technology is, demonstrated through all of this emergency transition and the fact that our students are giving us good feedback. Having said that, young people at university need to be together and we also have an on campus experience. For example our Creative intelligence Capstone Subject, we’re managing to get them all into our campus, but in kind of shifts so that they have that real world, you know, social aspect and that we’re doing it in a socially distance way. There are many protocols at the university to keep everyone safe as you can imagine. And we take all of our advice from NSW health, but we’re still maintaining an incredible learning experience as evidenced by student feedback in spite of it all. Caroline’s asking one question “Thanks for asking questions. Just one more My daughter is interested in combining engineering with creative intelligence. How would these courses complement each other”? Engineering can be a little longer. So what our engineers tend to do and definitely they complement each other our students walk into jobs in engineering at the end of it because of our industry partners. So Oricon, huge engineering company, one of our partners, we do their design Academy, which is their in-house training for engineers and engineers of the future are going to be doing a lot more than just sitting at the Computer Engineering, in fact, they’re creating pathways that kind of look a bit like a BCII or Diploma for their staff. So it’s a really interesting combination. What our engineers tend to do is they do three years of their engineering degree, then they pop out, and they come into our fourth year of BCII. Because we have what’s called the cohort effect, people get really close, make friends for life in this degree, so they want to stay with their cohort. And so they pop out for the year into fourth year BCII. And then they pop back into engineering often a year below. And then you know we’ve had students go off and work in our partners, they run industry innovation projects, my students and there’s a beautiful synergy. Engineering can be. Martin maybe you’ll want to talk about the need for more creativity in engineering, having been an engineer.
49:10
I mean, one thing having been an engineer is like, we often jump to the solution, someone’s got a problem and you instantly want to solve it. But actually, we are teaching people to step back a bit and not race to that solution and realise what it’s like, is this problem actually worth solving? Or is this problem just a symptom of a much bigger problem and my wish would be solving that problem, that systemic problem. So usually combat that headspace and the holistic view of what’s going on. If you’re standing in the discipline, for sure, but then quite often, sometimes you’ll see the students don’t even stay in the discipline. So with the project, which we ran with all the councils, one of the students that stood out right away was a structural engineering student. And so I sat in on a phone call between him and two industry partners or his team with the two industry partners and right off the bat, they were amazed they were like, his team was able to accomplish as much as they did in two days. Then, like, right there, they were saying like, if this is what you’ve done, come work for us, we’ll offer you a job. And his reply was, thanks that was actually the second job offer he’s gotten today. The work that they’re doing, I mean, the engineering side, teaches a lot of analytical thinking, the way he was able to, he and his team, were able to dissect what an ecosystem is and represent it and present it back to the industry partners. Had a lot you can see the Engineering logic played through that. We’re now actually presenting some of the students work as part of the spark Festival, which is a now national festival for innovation and start-ups and entrepreneurship. And we’re also part of the National Economic Development conference In November. Where we will be presenting some of the students work so we’re giving the students a huge podium to say here’s some of the amazing work that you’ve done. And it could be well beyond their core discipline, but it’s still just like the transformative experience for them. So it’s in some regards, it’s somewhat predictable, okay, engineering and creativity, you’re doing amazing things. In other cases, it’s totally unpredictable what they’ll be up to.
51:13
And I back that idea that our students have been given lots of opportunities to engage internationally and nationally, so they’re often our faculty students are always chosen to present for the Vice Chancellor to attend, you know, Australian Technology Network University conferences and present there to CIOs conference, they presented their work there. They have all of these opportunities that are quite extraordinary.
51:45
Even worked for the Governor of New South Wales.
51:48
They worked for the Governor of NSW.
51:49
That was one that was an internship, wasn’t it, there was a question earlier about what the internship opportunities were. But they’re really quite extraordinary.
52:07
Any more questions? If you really want to see what a student’s experience is like trying to jump into the chat rooms between now and eight o’clock, a lot of you’ll see a lot of students answering the questions on the University’s behalf. So you’ll really get their perspective as well.
52:27
And there’s about 50% students in this call, not just parents, so go and speak to the people that you might end up hanging out with and meeting in the BCII Connect society, which is a really active society, they have lots of events, and even through COVID we’ve been doing some quite extraordinary events including online agora’s where students have you know, in Agora’s is a place, a Greek notion of exchanging ideas as well as vegetables and comes from the philosophical idea of an Agora, we’ve been having really fun learning experiences that are Agora style online and some of them will be able to tell you about BCII connect global opportunities. We’ve got one student, Emily, who came to a Utopian village in South India with us, and she’ll be able to tell you about her experience. We have so much funding to take students overseas when that opens up again, which I hope it will sooner or later to secure corridors projects. And we hope to be able to bring that live again because we’ve got funding waiting for students to go overseas. Is there anything else any final question?
53:53
Otherwise, we’ll wrap because we can also continue talking one on one live, via our chat forum, between now and eight o’clock, which is another hour. And we’ll also be able to do a one on one chat on Saturday, the 5th of September between 10am and 2pm. Or also be able to get in touch by innovation@uts.edu.au. And if you show your final screen, Martin, you’ll be able to show that address.
54:29
Right.
54:40
Thank you for coming along. Thank you for your feedback. And we hope to see you or your children very soon, and wish all the best for upcoming exams for those of you who are doing exams.
55:04
So do keep in touch and feel free to reach out to us directly too.
55:16
Thanks for the feedback.