This is the transcript for the video Bachelor of Creative Intelligence & Innovation/Diploma in Innovation webinar for students
0:00
Welcome, everybody. I’d like to acknowledge the gadigal people of the eora nation upon whose ancestral lands our City Campus now stands. I’d also like to pay respect to the elders, both past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for this land. Welcome to creative intelligence and innovation and the Diploma in innovation at UTS. We’re about to go live. Just a little bit of housekeeping first, we’re recording this session, and hopefully that will be of great assistance to everybody. And we’re the people who are looking after you today. I’m Ben Le Hunte, the course director of BCII. And Martin Bliemel who is the Course Director of the Diploma in innovation. We’re going to talk about how those two are related. Hopefully all of you have seen the video intro to BCII and the Diploma. And if not, you can access them on our site. And we’ll tell you more about that in our chat. And also after this session in tawk.to. We want to make this really interactive. How do we do this, you ask questions throughout. And in zoom, if you look at those little boxes in your zoom page, you’ll have those little interactive Q&A button. If you press that and ask questions, we’ll be able to respond to them either at the end or as we go along. Whatever is the most appropriate. Here are a list of all the other events that are happening during open week. You can chat one on one to our students or academics, and go to those general talks and there’s also an innovation, Diploma in Innovation and BCII webinar for parents on Thursday evening between six and seven if you’d like to send your parents along. And of course, you get to hear from BCII students directly, nothing like hearing it from them, and don’t take our word for it. They’re our biggest advocates and they’ll also be able to speak to you about the student experience, which is what you’ll be most interested in. Now, for those of you who haven’t had a chance to look at the video about BCII, and Diploma in Innovation, I’ll just take you very quickly through what it is. And then I’ll take you through the student journey, what it looks like to go through this degree from start to finish, what you’ll learn, what your experiences might be, who you’ll get to engage with, and so on.
2:51
So briefly, the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation is an accelerated combined degree at UTS. It combines with 25 different degrees, 25 different disciplines and seven faculties. So it’s one of those incredible degrees that brings together the whole university, you’ll have friendship groups, from all the disciplines and be connected to the entire university. So that’s a kind of DNA map of the degree. We have students from Arts and Social Sciences, from Business, from Design Architecture building from Engineering and IT, Health, Law and Science. And this is what the degree looks like in terms of your time. So you’ll see in that year one you’ll have session one and session two, those are the semesters. In blue, you’ll have your six credit points subjects from your core degree. And then in the winter School of your first year you’ll do that subject problems to possibilities, and in your summer school for two weeks each time you’ll do Creative Practice and Methods. So you’ll do those two summer winter schools every year for the first three years. In your final year, you’ll have the full time year in BCII. Most of you haven’t completed your core degree. Hopefully that makes sense. Please let me know if you have any questions about that.
4:27
We’ve got a question from Christina, I’ll answer that at the end, possibly because it’s about doing a switch this year. So let’s talk about what you actually do in the diploma and first of all in the BCII, and then the diploma – Martin will take on after I finished off here. So I’m going to show some slides which just grab a few statements from students. Of course, you’re going to speak with students directly and find out what it’s about, but I’ll try and give you a sense of what that student journey looks like from beginning to end. From the first time you come on campus early on in the year in 2021, you’ll be invited to a welcome event. Your welcome event will introduce you to some of the practices of creative intelligence. And it will introduce you to an incredible network of friends who will remain friends for life. This is one of the most wonderful things about the BCII experience. Our alumni are still incredibly networked and connected with the degree as well. It’s sometimes described as a club that nobody ever wants to leave. That starts off with a dinner party brief on your welcome day where you get to organise dinner party so that you get to meet people from across the university before you even join your first winter school ‘Problems to Possibilities’ in July. What happens in ‘Problems to Possibilities’? In problems to possibilities you’ll start tackling live industry briefs you’ll work with our industry partners from the first school onwards. So what students have done in the past in that first school is tackle a live challenge like alcohol fuelled violence in Kings Cross or the death of Oxford Street, many of those in city based challenges. You’ll be given a deck of transdisciplinary method cards and introduced to over 50 methods from across the disciplines. And you’ll also be introduced to our incredible ideas arena where you get to understand some of the cutting edge ideas across the disciplines and you also get to curate your own set of ideas, and work with students across all the different faculties at UTS on their ideas on how to push those ideas. So that’s your first school. It’s your first kiss with transdisciplinary thinking which is what this degree is all about. How to solve problems across disciplines how to understand complexity, how to understand future thinking, and getting to grips with entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and developing some really fabulous critical and creative thinking skills from your first school onwards. And of course, linking all of that back to your core degree. Your core degree is really important because that grows alongside your skills in creative intelligence, which is essentially the art of many intelligences working together and understanding how to creatively tap into those. So that’s first school – problems to possibilities. By the end of ‘Problems to Possibilities’, you’ll have tried out a few groups of friends and you’ll have tried problem solving in a few groups. And then you’ll go into your second school, which is called ‘Creative Practice and Methods’ where you’ll be introduced to creative methods from across the disciplines. Again, you work with an industry partner. We’ve had some incredible industry partners in the past for this school. We’ve worked with zenith Media and SBS on live challenges, for example, to triple the digital consumption of SBS, we’ve worked with, you know, organisations, like digital around how to increase entrepreneurship amongst young people. And we’ve worked with ABC on the perfect challenge, perfect storm of challenges that they had one year, we’ve worked with Google, in this same school on enhancing uptake in the Asia Pacific region. So those are the kind of briefs that you get. If you had the ideas Arena in ‘Problems to Possibilities’, in this school, you get to explore the methods arena, which is all of these incredible methods from across the disciplines for problem solving for understanding complexity, and to begin thinking about future thinking, and you’ll get to invent your own methods. One of the wonderful briefs in this school is actually understanding how you cannot just be a consumer of knowledge, but a producer of knowledge. So you don’t just, we produce design thinking you create your own methods in this school. And you’ll also start working on a social challenge of your choice with your team. And again, you’ll work with many different teams.
9:21
So by the end of that year, at the end of your first year, you’re then ready to go into your second year. Your core degree is developing and dovetailing beautifully with BCII. I advise you to look at all the links and there’s a link for every combination of degree. So there’s little videos made with how you combine your degrees and what the benefit is in in terms of your core degree. And in terms of being a differentiator, differentiated graduate of this dual degree programme. So BCII is a huge differentiator. It does help students get Job’s. Second year, you start off with Winter school called ‘Past present future of innovation’. This is a really wonderful school to start thinking about future thinking, and futuring skills and future methods. So we have a Futures arena, just like we had the Ideas Arena and the Methods Arena in the two previous schools. In this school, we have a futures arena where you’ll be introduced to many future thinking methods and ways of understanding disruption in our fields. And this is essentially a change maker studio, you’ll be understanding how to make changes and intervene in their systems. So in the past, we’ve done big projects around the future of media or the future of transport and mobility. And the future of payments with visa, for example, and the future of mobility with was with Honda. And the future of media was with JWT – J.Walter Thompson. So again, you’ll be working with industry partners throughout these schools. And your summer school in your second year is a real turning point. It’s called ‘Creativity and complexity’. And you’ll be learning about complex systems, systems thinking how to intervene in these complex challenges of our time, using your transdisciplinary skills and using a whole host of methods to come up with sort of probes that will empower you to understand how to shift the system. And again, you’ll be working on real social challenges and industry partnership challenges. In the last year we worked on climate change and the bush fires, for example, as a complex system. And we’re living in a complex system right now, through these times as we’re going through this incredible pandemic that has shifted everything. So we’ve had to understand how all our disciplines come together for this, and we’ve had to understand the psychology of distance, the business of, of, you know, crisis management, we’ve had to understand the sociology and culture of shifts that are happening at the moment in our world. So you can understand how these complex challenges of our times actually require our disciplines to work together. So that’s the end of your second year. Imagine now you’re at the beginning of your third year, you’re really confident by this time, you can talk very confidently about what creative intelligence and innovation is, because at the first, at the outset, you won’t know what on earth it is. And people will ask you what degree you do and you won’t know quite how to answer that question. But by your third year, you should know. Your first winter school that year will be ‘Leading Innovation’ where you will learn to lead change and understand organisations and how to lead and lots of leadership skills you’ll learn in that particular school because we really believe that all of our students are future leaders. And we educate you to be to take up those changemaking positions. The next school, the final school, in that three year sort of trilogy is called ‘Initiatives and Entrepreneurship’. And here you get to develop a start-up idea that might turn into a passion in your fourth year, and you might want to develop throughout your fourth year and some of our students have even graduated running start-up that they founded or at least began to understand in this summer school ‘Initiatives in Entrepreneurship’. So you’ll get to meet founders, you’ll get to understand agile thinking and lean methodologies and all of that innovation terminology and practice around an entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship and you’ll also have gone through your system’s thinking and understand how valuable those initiatives are in making change. And you’ll be able to lead the change because you’ve gone through this leading innovation experience in your winter school.
14:13
So then you’re ready for your fourth year. Fourth year is a full time in BCII, we try and think of it as four streams. The first stream would be around industry, change making. So what does it look like to be an intrapreneur? Someone who creates change and understands innovation within organisations. The second stream is entrepreneurship stream and understanding, you know how to make those changes through start-ups. And this is the kind of serial entrepreneurship stream you’ll understand the whole entrepreneurship ecosystem in that year if you want to invest in that part. The third one is assistance Changemaker stream, which is everyone participates in to an extent. And because we’re all part of an ecosystem together, and that’s a game changers stream. Developing the skills of creativity and complexity you’ve developed in your second year. And the last stream is the new knowledge maker stream. And there’s actually an option to do an honours year, in your fourth year in BCII. And this is a wonderful opportunity to research at depth at the cutting edge of your core disciplinary field, and understand how that knowledge and understanding relates and translates to other fields. So what did the subjects look like if those are the four streams. The major subject in your first semester is ‘Industry innovation project’, where you’re given your own industry partners to manage you take the brief, in the previous years we’ve all been taking briefs for you as academics. In the final year, you’re managing your own projects, managing your own industry partners with support from us. Of course, you’ll have academic tutors. And you’ll also have industry partners. We’ve learned in this wonderful third space environment we call it where partners and students and academics and tutors all learn together. So that’s that experience before you even start the year you’ll do an industry internship, which is in the innovation ecosystem. And this year because there’s been a challenge finding those internships, we’ve had an incredible online cutting edge virtual internship offering called pi x or professional emotion programme where students actually have had to work with up to 60 industry partners from Deloitte to Regional Development Australia, and they’ve been given challenges almost on a daily basis, but they’ve actually had the experience of recruiting interviewing for a stream being employed being on-boarded and then doing that project live. And you’ll also have the opportunity to do your honours subject, which will be a new knowledge making lab or envisioning futures, which leads into your honours stream in that first semester. Second semester, you’ll be doing your own creative intelligence capstone project. And you’ll also have a chance to do either a second internship or a subject called spec start-up, where you get to develop your entrepreneurial skills. And you can take that into your final Capstone subject, which is called Creative Intelligence Capstone where you get decide what to work on. You create your own brief, you go out and find partners and stakeholders, and you deliver that project in an incredible exhibition at the end unless you’re going into the honours stream, in which case you’ll be working towards a research proposal and your honours presentation, a couple of months later. So that’s a really rough outline of what your journey looks like.
18:09
I’m just gonna see if we can take any questions before we’re moving on. So Jackie “has the entry mark the business BCII dropped, it was 99 seems to be 87”?. I think that I think that it changes every year and it’s very hard to predict what our entry scores will be. But one of the things we do recommend is that you put BCII combined preference at the very top of your list of UAC preferences, don’t put your core degree and then the combination later because you will get into your core degree. BCII is always slightly higher in the ATAR requirements. And so you really should put the combined degree at the very top or you’ll get admitted into the single degree only.
19:06
“Does doing architecture and BCII clash with regard to finding architecture placements and internships in the breaks? Question from Melissa. Certainly not our architecture students have gone on to have incredible opportunities in their field and completed the degree in four years, which is the standard practice. We’ve even managed to accommodate architects who’ve gone on, for example, global studios for architecture and then come on global studios with us, because one thing is I didn’t mention is we offer at least we hope to offer and we’ve always had incredible funding to take our students on global studios. We’ve taken them to utopian communities in Oroville. We take them to India. They’ve had funding to go on design collaborations in Denmark. And to entrepreneurial schools in Belgium, and so on, the opportunities are incredible. And lots of them lead to employment. Our degree has one of the best employment outcomes, I’d say in Australia, if not the world at around 92% of employment. And many of our students getting employed through the work they do with industry partners to snap them up, because they can see that they work in incredible teams together. So I’m going to show you a few more slides. And just to give you a sense of what it’s like, while we wait for further questions. “Applying from Victoria, we have a delayed ATAR. will this affect my application chances”? Says Martha. I would love to say that it won’t affect your application chances at all because there are several stages of offers. We’ve had students you know who, from Western Australia from further afield within Australia, we have students from all over Australia, join BCII, as well as a few international students would like more but you know, because innovation is a global endeavour. Yeah, so any other questions? “How does adjustment factors work? And how many can you receive? If you were to get 88 ATAR and five adjustment factors”? I think that, that does mean , I would check and check in again, later with one of our admin team, but I think that the adjustments work just fine. And they’ll be able to send you a link to how the adjustments are calculated. And so keep your questions coming in. We’ve got I’ve got a few more minutes. And then Martin is going to take over with a discussion around the Diploma in Innovation and which is actually a pathway to BCII. So that’s worth sticking around for. If you’re worried about your ATAR not being up to scratch, we’ve created an incredible pathway into BCII for students, and from diverse backgrounds. And this will allow you if you’ve done well in your diploma in innovation, which is two subjects that first summer need to school every year, to move into BCII for your second year and join our cohort. Christina says “I’ve got an offer for B business November 2020. And I’d like to add Dip innovation to it”. I think Martin will speak to that. Christina, you can definitely add Diploma in innovation. without going through any UAC preference, you just make the application directly if you’re a UTS student. So up here on the slides, lots of information about social aspects of the degree. It is a social degree. And the Facebook page is filled with opportunities on a weekly basis.
23:18
there in the middle is one of our architects for those future architects there he said he graduated as top of architecture in his year. He was a BCII Graduate. Done incredibly, Michael Northie. And yes, so BCII is a real differentiator, like I said, people do get snapped up because having a single degree often, like for example, with business, you’ll have a couple of thousand graduates every year from, you know, our university alone. So how do you differentiate yourself? That becomes the important question. And lots of our academics from other disciplines also talk about how those students really stand out who do BCII in their core degrees. So this is one of the environments in the slide here of how you get to really present your work. There’s lots of open environments, exhibition opportunities. And Jasmine says “where can you find the ATAR of your core course of BCII. e.g. I’m looking at BSI BCII”. That information, I think one of our admin people will answer and I think that it will, come to the live chat later, and we’ll link you to a page where previous ATAR scores were available.
24:57
Okay, so any other questions? Keep them coming in. I’ve got another couple of minutes to answer your questions. I’m just going to show you the slides until the end of it. Please come along afterwards and ask your individual questions then and we meet our students and get all the information you need from them as well.
25:29
So, yes, so this slides about the non-traditional ways of learning, we don’t have exams worth mentioning. We have incredible sort of diverse learning experiences that are very interactive, they’re called active learning or problem based learning. And, it will take many forms like I’ve given you examples of, you know, method sand pits you might be in we do straw man proposals where you get to pitch ideas. We’ve done sort of playdough capitalism exercises where you’ll understand how money moves around and how surplus is managed. And we’ve done think tanks and hackathons and, and dragons’ dens and we’ve done sponsored inventions where students have actually gone on and applied for, you know, for their IP to be developed. And that’s something that is a real possibility, actually, while you’re an undergraduate, the idea that you might have some of your ideas taken up and, and made real.
26:42
Okay, so if we don’t have any further questions, I’d like to hand over now to Martin. And let him talk you through the Diploma in innovation as a standalone degree, as well as a diploma as a pathway into BCII. At the end of your second year, and what that looks like, over to you Martin.
27:07
Happy to answer more questions during the Q&A process. And there’s some that are answered in writing and some that are answering live. We can always follow up with you in the live chat as well. So let me tell you about the Diploma in innovation. So the Diploma in innovation is first of all, the just the word diploma can cause a little bit of a tripping point for some people because it’s seen as something that’s like an entry into a degree. But that’s just it’s just called that because it’s 48 credit points versus a second degrees 96 credit points and a core degrees 144 credit points. Largely just about the vinyl learning but designed at the same high quality as the BCII and adds tremendous value to any degree. So don’t let the word diploma fool you, it’s really something that’s really high value add to a core degree. And it’s born from the same thinking the same concepts come from the same stone, I guess, as the BCII. To really get students across the whole university to work together for all their concepts, all their disciplines, all their theories, all their ideas, all of you to mesh together in transdisciplinary teams to work with your respective disciplinary knowledge is but also with the industry partners and all just to so it adds to any undergraduate bachelor’s degree. So the main thing is that you come here for, you start with your undergraduate degree at UTS, and then it’s an internal application to the diploma so you don’t apply through you UAC. For the diploma you apply through UAC for your core degree. Once you here then it is an internal application process for the diploma. It works for any, to any single degree and any double degree programme except for the BCII double degree. There’s some differentiating factors between the diploma and the BCII. So one of them is the diploma has a mix between creative intelligence. So again, this really big systems thinking big picture thinking. And then it’s coupled with the entrepreneurial side, but the balance is different. So it’s about half Entrepreneurship and half, learning how to experiment and start small and conducted really efficient small experiments to think about how to institutionalise operationalize how to make your idea a real thing, so that can have the system wide impact. Then the way it’s delivered is slightly different. So we run in three week mode instead of the BCII’s 2 week mode. So it’s two days a week times three weeks and it’s run during the summers and winters like the BCII. With the 48 credit points worth of learning, you can finish the same time as your core degree. So it doesn’t add that 4th year, this is a second degree that you can take and can and can finish the same time as your core degree. And then for those of you who are interested in the BCII, as Bem mentioned, preference the BCII first, the ATARS are typically lower for core degrees than they are for the BCII. If you don’t get into the BCII, you can come here for the core degree add the diploma and use that as a pathway into the BCII. And we’ll speak about that towards the end.
28:14
And there’s another differentiating factor which we’ll get into in a second when I talk through the structure of the diploma. So one thing that you might have noticed if you did assuming you read some of the same reports we do like the world economic future jobs reports, they come out every couple of years. The by far the most important skills that they find consistently year after year report after report is around really these human centred skills around creativity around innovation around critical thinking. A lot of them a lot of the reports tend to focus on the individual’s ability to be creative and the individual’s ability to be analytical and think critically and innovate. But some of them are actually realising wait a second, it’s actually these cross disciplinary these collaborative skills that will differentiate you. So by the time you graduate, if think about what you want to do, what you want to do, chances are, you know, might be a functional role in a certain capacity, but you will have to interact with people outside. I love using the analogy of like work outside the cubicle. So like my first degree was mechanical engineering. My first job was to work basically in a cubicle, drafting drawings for skyscrapers and bridges. But I’d have to work with the rest of the company. So it really got you to think integrated like this will really help you to understand the how the whole organisation operates within the organisation and also how that organisation works with that in a sector within an industry so it gives you this really big picture thinking to say wait a second, are we actually doing what we should be doing? And what’s the best way to do it? And here’s just a small selection I guess of report after report after report that emphasises these capabilities will set you apart.
32:19
And these capabilities are also are also known as transversal capabilities or portable capabilities. So you’ve got your functional capabilities which are good for that job. But these capabilities help you go from job to job and also career to career. So what can you take complete change careers, the disability to work with others, collaborate with them and work within a sector and have that systems view of what needs to get done. Those capabilities will carry you for the rest of your career. This is a little academic, but any core degree will have very disciplinary specific knowledge that you need to learn if you look at our graduates’ attributes, by the time you graduate, this is what we want our graduates to have. So these graduate attributes are basically agnostic of discipline, we want you to be able to think in terms of complex systems to basically see the forest, not just the individual trees has to understand how, how the world works and how at different scales that small complex system through to global complex systems. And to do so in a way that you’re constantly seeking value that you had to figure out how to make move the roll forward to a better place, to think critically about what’s going on. And to think through very, I guess, using the method cards and procedures that we teach you is to really think through where are these intersections between disciplines? How do we get one discipline to talk to another discipline? What are these kind of level playing fields for where one discipline isn’t superior to another because we’re all trying to figure out how to solve these wicked problems. And of course, we all want to do this ethically, imaginatively with in a very responsible way. So that cuts through the other graduate attributes. The Diploma above all really targets these entrepreneurial skills. Where we really get you to push through of, if you were to pursue your idea, how would you or how could you structure as your own independent start-up package, become the master of your own environment. To really, you know, be the champion and take direction from the market or take direction from the stakeholders around you rather than simply be told what to do in a large organisation.
34:40
So here’s the structure visualised for the Diploma in Innovation. So you’ve got your core degree, just kind of these grey boxes here – one year, two year, three. This works with double degrees as well. And in the summers and winters are our subjects which are eight credit points and slightly longer than a slightly more intense than the six credit points that are in most core degrees. And the structure that we visualised here is just the recommended structure. You can in the diploma, rotate the subjects out of sequence. And you can actually take two of the subjects simultaneously as well. So the subjects run two days a week. So some run Mondays and Thursdays other ones run Tuesdays and Fridays. So, if you really want to you can take two subjects simultaneously, it makes for a very intense block mode term, but it can also accelerate your pathway through the diploma. Let’s say you started late and then want to catch up. Or you started early and just want to look ahead.
35:39
So like the BCII. The first is visualised here, the first subject is directly analogous to the BCII ‘Problems to Possibilities’. This is, in our case, we call it ‘Impossibilities to Possibilities’. Where we teach you really just some basics about how to appreciate who you are in context of other people’s disciplines in a wicked problem in a way that familiar arises you with how to start addressing some of the wicked problems. But without jumping to a solution just yet, the longer you stay in a problem space, the more you realise just how interconnected things are. Then the second create intelligence modules, either ‘Technology Methods and Creative Practice’ or ‘Frame Innovation’. So this is where he would give you more guidance on methods to get towards a potential solution. So take you out of the problem space to really think through what are some of the methods and the ways forward that you could make more tangible and more concrete. Those two subjects are pretty much the only ones that are more or less directly analogous to what you’d see in the BCII. And those two are also part of the pathway into the BCII. So again, If you want to get into the BCII, preference it first in the UAC, then your core degree. And if you don’t get in directly through UAC, come here for your core degree, apply for the diploma and then use this as a pathway into the BCII But for those of you interested in diploma, which I hope many of you are, this is where the Diploma takes on a slightly different flavour. So the out of the entrepreneurship subjects, the first one is ‘Navigating Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and Initiating Change’. So this gets you to really think about the, I guess more the economic or the business landscape around you. So the most recent one we’ve worked with Georges River council, Sutherland Shire Council, Wollongong Council, Bayside Council, regional development Australia and regional development Australia, Sydney office – to think through how do you take the system, the society, the people, the public services, the libraries, the economic foundation around them and get it to work in one cohesive, holistic, coordinated way. Rather than people waking up going to the job and coming home. How do you get them to operate as a system? And then to really think through Okay, what is your role in that system? What’s the council’s role? What’s your role as a student or prospective entrepreneur. Then the next creative intelligence subjects are more the context in which this happens. And they’re both quite forward looking. So what is the future thinking subjects which focus on future methods, and the other ones more around complexity and sustainability, which takes more of a flavour of ecological or environmental sustainability or energy sustainability. The next few subjects really start digging deeper on the entrepreneurial side to really push that if you are interested in pursuing your own idea. We’re just interested in how entrepreneurs pursue ideas so that you can better support them really push through on some of the methods by which you could experiment and test what is a good idea. And you don’t have to have oodles of money, you don’t have to raise venture capital. You don’t have to have a finished product in mind, you don’t have to have a physical prototype or anything. We’ll get there like we have, there’s some really basic methods and techniques that are invaluable for start-ups and entrepreneurs that are applicable well beyond that as well. And then the last subject takes more the form of developing a platform upon which you pursue multiple opportunities. So like the BCII we share a lot of the industry partners we have had World Wildlife Federation in here the National Centre of indigenous excellence, Microsoft, IKEA tech stream labs, fish burners, some of the start-up spaces, KPMG, I mentioned all the councils that we had, Energy Lab, and quite a few entrepreneurs as guest speakers as well for you to learn from.
39:33
I’ll come back to some of the questions that are written down, some of them I answered in text while I was there before. The one thing that’s students find is, it’s a really rich environment, like you end up being with a mix of different mix of students every subject because you can rotate the subject out of sequence. You have a very, very broad cohort of students. So each, each class might have a smaller cohort where you gel as a class or as it’s not the subject level, but then from subjects you kind of reshuffle the deck and meet new people.
40:10
And here’s a quote from Joel Meredith, if you find him in one of the chat rooms, he’s a really good person to talk to you about the transition from the Diploma to the BCII, to use that as a pathway, so he started in the diploma for the first few subjects and then transferred to the BCII. So one thing you’ll find is a lot of the students they really enjoy not just learning the concepts and methods, but learning by applying the concepts and methods. So pretty much everything we do is very, very experiential. So Bem mentioned that we don’t have any exams, we don’t. A lot of the assessments are done, basically as really fun group work. We try and give you as much time in the classroom to work on that group work often with the industry partner in the classroom, or you checking in with them in regular intervals so that you’re working with them and learning with them, and they’re frankly also learning a lot from me too. So it is very much like a fun and engaging experience. In the last July school actually I was in on a conference call between some students and one of the industry partners. And right there on the spot, they offered him a job. So look, if you’ve been able to get this far in the last two days, then you should work for us like we’re happy to offer you a job. His reply was basically thank you very much this is the second job offer I’ve had today. I don’t know how serious they were. But if even for them to say something like that was phenomenal. One of the questions actually ties in with us here nicely is what are the resources that you have available to you when you’re at UTS? So if you want to pursue your own ideas, here are the resources you have. Yes, you have the faculty members. Yes, you have the classroom and the materials but it goes well beyond that. You’ve got the alumni network, you’ve got each other the other students in the classroom are phenomenal resources to draw on, particularly because they’re not like you. So you can find the other people whose skills and capabilities complement yours. So this photo here was shot in UTS start-ups space. So you’ve got UTS start-ups, which is basically a free resource to help you think through your start-up ideas. They run all kinds of workshops, they get amazing industry mentors, they’re available for you to draw on, there’s something called proto space. So if you want to get into the hardware side, you can draw on protospacer do a lot of 3d printing and prototyping there too. That’s not entirely free. Basically, all you pay for is the material costs and you get charged those at cost. It’s dirt cheap for students. So there are tonnes of resources that are just kind of right at your fingertips to draw on. Lastly, the one last thing would be to mention the pathway from the diploma into the BCII is, I’m assuming you probably saw some of this in the previous video, is you have to have, I think, an 85 or 75. You have to do well on those first two creative intelligence subjects. This is all on the FAQ, and then apply for what’s called an internal course transfer. And then you can transfer out of the diploma into the BCII. Worried about that after you’ve gotten here first, there’s more information about that on the Diploma web page.
43:35
So one of them is he got an offer to start in November for the November intake, and he would like to add the diploma to it. The diploma intake is kind of a rolling intake. So if you come here for your core degree, we recommend you start the diploma at the same time as the beginning of your core degree. You can start adding it on a little bit later than the beginning of your core degree. You can even finish it after you core degree You don’t have to finish them at the same time. But not too much later. We don’t like to, get it too out of sync. So if you’re starting here in November, there is an application form that I’d encourage you to fill out as soon as possible. So that you would effectively start with your core degree and the diploma simultaneously. And then you can take two of the diploma’s subjects immediately in the December session, which is technically even starts in mid-November. One of them is the ‘Impossibility to Possibilities’ subject and then this December session also have ‘Evaluating portfolios about Innovative Opportunities’, which is starting that same time so you can start with either of those subjects or even both of them simultaneously. Then the next session would be in July, or sorry, then February. There’s another one in February technology methods and creative practices starts in February. So between November and February, you could pick up 3 of the diploma subjects already. But definitely apply right away. If you have detailed questions about that, shoot me a message and happy to help you through that. Because there are, depending on the timing of your degree starts, what the cut-off is for the enrolment for the diploma. That timing it could be a little bit tight for the November intake.
45:24
Any other questions? I don’t know if I answered that one. “If you do an undergraduate degree, can you apply for diploma straightaway in year one, or do you have to wait until you have done two years of your core degree”. Yep, so definitely, it’s we’ve schematically drawn it up as if you start in your first year. If you go to the diploma website which is dipinn.uts.edu.au
46:08
On the left hand side, there’s the FAQ section. In the FAQ section, towards the bottom, there’s a bit that says I need a visual, give me a visual of how the timing works out. There, I’ve tried to lay out different pathways through so you can start the Diploma in your second year, you could even start in your third, the only time you can’t start it is at the end of your third year when you’re already kind of earmarked for graduation. Because if you started then then what would happen is you would actually be taking the diploma after you’ve taken your last undergraduate course and it sort of turned into a postcard diploma and we can’t have that happen. So you have to start it while you’re a current undergraduate degree ideally towards the beginning of an undergraduate degree.
46:46
But yes, you can start in your second year, even in your third year.
46:51
Are there any subjects that are not able to work with the diploma? I’m going to guess that what you mean any degrees that don’t work with the diploma From what I’ve understood, we’ve This works with pretty much any degree programme. There might occasionally be some scheduled classes depending on when your core degree programme has their summer internships. But generally we can find a workaround for that sometimes it has to be done on a one on one basis. But this was designed to open up transdisciplinary thinking to any undergraduate degree. When the BCII was first started, it targeted 25 core degrees to pair up to create those 25 double degrees. And the diploma is the way to offer this level of training for these graduate attributes to the whole of the university.
47:48
Martin there’s a question from Christina chin. I might chime in. Do you want to close your screen and we can just show faces for the last 10 minutes or so yeah,
47:57
by all means we do want this to be more of a Q&A conversation like so, a lot of what we’ve talked about in the slides, you’ve hopefully seen or can review in the videos. Do you want to start that question?
48:11
Yes. So Christina has asked, “How do lessons in group work look like since everything is online?” And that’s something that I’ve been, you know, there was an emergency transition to online learning and teaching, which has gone incredibly smoothly at UTS. The student feedback surveys have been phenomenal for our degrees. In fact, in some instances, the feedback has been even better than the live face to face classes. So yes, the experience has been good for students. Did I mention that the BCII has won three awards? One international and two major national ones and I think that’s because of the quality of the learning and the quality of the teaching staff and also the incredible relationships and opportunities that students get through engagement in this degree so, so the group work does look different if it’s online. So this semester we’ve got, for example, our capstone subjects are half online and half face to face. So we’ve got some students face to face, and only a small percentage of university classes have gone back to face to face. So we’re rotating students in our spaces so that we can socially distance them. We’re creating really slick and interactive, I guess you could call it, active learning opportunities online through our learning management system, which is canvas that is there for you to do in your own time as a synchronous study. A lot of our students have said that’s really helpful for them and it saves them coming in. And then there’s absolutely collaboration as always through zoom breakout rooms, through students organising their own breakouts and meetups and social activities in a socially distance way. We’ve even had like, one year in BCII we had an Agora in fourth year, which is a live event. I don’t know if you know about the Greek concept of an Agora, but it’s like a marketplace where ideas are exchanged just as much as fruit and vegetables and what have you. So students created an online Agora this year, which they sent out, you know, party bags to people there were incredible experiences that students could design themselves some students sitting in their homes in small groups, you know, doing all of the interactive social activities, which were extraordinary from like kind of Cards Against Humanity for the BCII to experiences of, you know, consent matters and all sorts of interesting ideas around bio mimicry, for example, that students got to play within these interactive sessions. So yeah, the learning goes on. I think we’re learning more than ever, at this time, about so much more, because we’ve had to learn. And we’ve had to interact in new ways we’ve had to learn about technology, we’ve had to learn about, you know, the possibilities of an education online. So good question.
51:26
Some of this is still in a state of flux. But depending on what the government regulation is, so if it’s a small enough class, we do have the option to request to the university that we plan for it to be face to face and then if COVID erupts again, then we can move it back to remote learning. So some of the smaller subjects like one of the December schools, I think we’ve requested that it be run online socially distance 1.5 metres apart. If it’s small enough cohort or class size, you can do that. With a larger class size you run into space issues. So where are we can we will try and go towards more in, I guess, live face to face learning. But the live and online learning where I’d like to think we’re doing a pretty good job there the all the feedback from the July schools that we’ve designed has been outstanding. The students see that we’re, we’re doing a fantastic job and just kind of, I guess, going above and beyond what they say they experienced before.
52:27
So the teachers we have are amazing too. And I think that that makes a difference. Everyone knows that. When you’re at school, for example, having a good teacher makes all the difference between loving a subject or not. And I think that one of the things that we do really well is provide incredible mentors from industry, from academia from across the disciplines, who you know throughout your four years often.
52:57
Any more questions from anybody? We’ve got another four minutes. If you have a burning question, please put it in the chat. Anyone would like to ask anything about how we learn, for example.
53:13
So the question about the assessment like how do you assess things if there are no exams?
53:20
Really interesting one.
53:22
If you go to the graduate attributes about what we want the capabilities that we want students to, to develop, it comes back to a good question like how do you assess somebody who is capable, if you’re assessing somebody’s knowledge, their ability to memorise information then an exam, can be an OK format. But what we’re looking for are some really unique capabilities that are around problem solving and interrogating really complex problems. So we can possibly see that through the behaviour, and then and how you address the challenges in the classroom. And that comes through in the reports and the presentations that you write up about your experience.
53:58
And I like to that by saying, you know, a lot of HSC is and I’ve got three kids so I know what HSC is all about a lot of HSC is about wrote learning and that’s one of the things that kills students in year 12. That horrible even having to repeat after me an essay in English essay which should be a creative processes is reduced to bullet points so you can memorise it. Now, we don’t deal with right or wrong answers. There are many complex ways of understanding and many ways of knowing the world and because we’re privileging that kind of transdisciplinarity and creativity we would prefer to focus on that many ways of knowing rather than that right wrong answer seeking. But actually, it’s very easy to do it’s very good to know that you’ve gained something and you’ve got something right. But we teach our students to sit in that space of uncertainty to you know, we teach them ignorance mapping framework, for example, how to promote discovery rather than knowledge. And so we have lots of ways to explore that. There’s another question coming in from Alicia. Who says “So if you do an undergraduate degree can you apply for the diploma straightaway in year one? Or do you have to wait until after you’ve done two years of the core degree?” Martin, would you like to have that cleared?
55:21
I think we already covered that the multiple times during your core degree you can join as long as it’s after the start before the finish and visualise a few different pathways on the diploma’s website and the FAQ section towards the very bottom of the FAQ section.
55:39
So we’ve got two minutes left. If anyone has any more burning questions do ask away otherwise, Bem and I will also be on the online chat to that text only chat room, as well as other students. And remember to email us innovation@uts.edu.au. If you have any more questions, we’re here to help you.
56:20
Then hopefully to see some of you in the chat rooms.
56:24
Well, this was one quick question, that he says, “What’s the best thing you’ve seen about BCII for students?” Which is a really cool question, because you know, it’s kind of like a wealth of opportunities. You wonder which one’s the best one and I think one of the things that I love about the BCII is that no student graduates the same. With this kind of transdisciplinary world where people are coming from so many different degrees. They’re bringing their different worldviews that their knowledge streams which we call the epistemology of knowledge and as well as their different beings. They’re ontologies, who are they? They’re bringing this. And it’s different every time. And it meshes in teams in different ways every time. So the best thing for BCII students, I think, is the incredible opportunities that they get to work in ways that no one else enjoys. It is such an uncommon and educational experience and truly transformative. And one thing that I love is research around transformative learning. One thing that happens in the BCII is people transform in ways that they do not predict. And I think that that is the most amazing thing. Often you think, Okay, I’m going to get a degree, I’m going to get a piece of paper, and it will be my ticket for life. But what ends up happening is much deeper and more profound than that. And you can speak to any of our students about this. And I’ve done some research on it. It’s kind of that deep notion of significance of what is doing and commitment to what you’re doing, and empowerment that you have, by the time you graduate, to go out there and change the world. In fact, our students always say it can’t work. That’s their biggest concern when they graduate, they won’t be able to make the changes that they want to see fast enough now that they have the skills and tools.
58:20
So on that note, I think just add to that one thing that I really liked about the students is their, but by the time they graduate, they’re really good at going back and telling people who they used to hold in high regard in authority and are able to tell them actually, you’re asking the wrong question. They reframe the problems back to them. So an industry partners might give you a challenge. And then by the time you graduate, you realise actually, a lot of industry people don’t really know how to pose a good question and provide a good challenge. And you see this in the corporate world all the time when somebody is given a brief or a proposal or a challenge, and it’s put out for tender and other companies bid on it when maybe it’s the wrong thing to do. Our students are amazing at pushing that back and then just flipping the table on the other person and say, wait a second, let me tell you the question you should be asking so that you can treat the symptoms, not the causes.
59:12
“If we’re going to be working in groups for this course, how would the student groups be arranged?” So I can, I can tell you very quickly that we have so many different methods for organising groups, some are self-organised, and some are organised around themes. Some are organised according to an algorithm that actually one of our IT students created for us around preferences. For example, in the fourth year, you get to choose currently, which industry partner you’d like to work with, and which ones you wouldn’t like to work with. And then you get allocated accordingly. So by the end by fourth year, you often know, many, many people in your cohort because you’ve rotated around a whole lot of different team combinations. You know, people’s strengths. You know their weaknesses, you know how to collaborate in ways that students generally don’t experience. And one thing that is profound about transdisciplinary learning is that the collaborative group work gets amazing feedback. And often in core degrees, people don’t like collaboration. They don’t like group work. That’s a general feedback in education.
1:00:23
Have we answered all your questions? I think that we’ve answered that live one. And, and the questions around entry marks, we’ll answer them in the chat room just now. So I think at this day, we’ve gone past six o’clock deadline. I’d like to thank you for joining us. And of course, if you have any further questions, we can chat one on one live, between 6 and 8pm tonight, and we’ll also run again tell your parents to come along between 4 to 8pm on 3rd of September, that’s this Thursday. And again, one on one chats will be running Saturday 5th of September from 10am to 2pm. And then get in touch by innovation@uts.edu.au. Thank you very much for joining us.
1:01:21
Thank you