Themes

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Regenerate and thrive

The last two years have profoundly changed how we think about tertiary education and its place in society. As the TEMC program takes shape for 2022, we want to hear your stories about how to regenerate and thrive through large-scale disruption.

  • How are you and your team responding to new ways of working? What has changed about how you interact with colleagues, clients and vendors? How do you maintain resilience and momentum?
  • What have you learned? How is the ‘new normal’ different for students, staff and alumni? What new skills and mindsets do we need for the 2020s?
  • What future opportunities do you see for the tertiary education sector? Are there new ambitions and expectations that did not exist two years ago? What will it take to regenerate and thrive in the next decade – for individuals, organisations and the sector?

Within the broad theme of Regenerate and Thrive, TEMC will explore how the last two years have affected our thinking about:

  • the campus experience
  • innovation
  • the learning experience
  • inclusion
  • leadership


Sub Themes

Campus experience

Suddenly in 2020 tertiary education campuses became 100% virtual. Buildings stood empty; teaching and services moved entirely online. What happened to the sticky campus?

Sessions in this program stream might address:

  • The changed health and safety landscape: managing the Great Return, creating healthy workspaces, responding to community expectations about personal safety on campus
  • Connection to Country
  • Reimagining the campus experience: campus activation, fewer people, new ways of using spaces, social learning for students and staff
  • Student perspectives on new tech, user experience, processes, legislative changes, and how life looks and feels in a COVID-19 world
  • New work practices: managing hybrid teams and tasks; reinventing the academic and social interactions that enrich the campus experience
  • Hybrid and multimodal delivery of programs and services
  • adapting campus infrastructure: campus presentation, ventilation, cleaning, maintenance and traffic / movement around campus
  • Enabling the best student experience


Innovation

In early 2020, blue-sky thinking suddenly took a back seat to demands for more immediate, rapid innovation. Two years later, most staff and students are fluent in the use of technology and we can work and learn from anywhere, any time. What does innovation mean in this new hyper-flexible context?

Sessions in this program stream might explore:

  • Global challenges and global / local (glocal) solutions: climate change, social and economic disadvantage, continuity and sustainability
  • What’s happened since 2020: achievements in innovation and best practice; redesigning student service delivery; new ways of working; adapting to thrive in a flexible environment
  • High performance culture: how do we improve the rigor and quality of our professional disciplines without becoming gatekeepers?
  • Opportunities for innovation that did not exist two years ago
  • Design thinking and UX / CX / EX research: how do we use human insights to imagine new futures? How do we stay innovation-driven and focused on socially-relevant experiences?


Learning experience

After decades of gradual adoption, within six months virtually every university course was adapted for online delivery in 2020. Post pandemic has set a new norm of on-line and in-campus hybrid learning, what are the new priorities for curriculum and instructional design?
Similarly, do staff need to adopt new approaches and mindsets for their own professional development?

Conference sessions in this stream might consider:

  • New pedagogies – student experience, student choice, teaching methods and how we support them, outcomes for students and academic staff
  • Students as customers, as interns, as self-directed learners in a democratised classroom
  • New learning models: blending the physical with digital, virtual and workplace learning; emerging technologies and approaches to teaching, learning and working
  • The virtual campus: how to provide a genuinely rich campus experience within an online learning environment
  • The changing role of academic staff: online teaching and curriculum development; implications for casualisation, career pathways, workload management and professional advancement
  • As professional staff, what lessons can we learn from adjacent disciplines? What happens when data science connects with student support services? Can the physical environment further enhance social learning?


Inclusion

Significant social changes are bringing new expectations to the post-pandemic campus. While students adjust to studying in the ‘third space’, staff are learning how to work in distributed, hybrid teams. Institutions are challenged to address long-standing issues of harassment and discrimination on campus. These challenges need to be balanced with our ever growing responsibilities towards protecting the global environment in a sustainable manner to support health and wellbeing.

How do we grow as professional staff and evolve our work practices to address difficult new areas, for example trauma-informed understanding, cultural literacy and the need to be truly inclusive?

Conference sessions in this stream might consider:

  • Indigenous values
  • Sustainability and climate change: influence on curriculum, day to day operations, staff and student opportunities for travel, institutional investments
  • Equity, diversity and inclusion
  • Reconnecting with students – strategies for enrichment and engagement​
  • Rituals, relationships, working in the ‘third space’ and hybrid teams
  • Eliminating discrimination and harassment
  • Disability and accessibility
  • Mental health and wellness in a COVID world, for students and/or staff
  • Impact of policy and politics on tertiary education institutions


Leadership

Research shows that women carried a disproportionate share of the additional work burden over the last 2.5 years, both at home and in the workplace. As we return to campus and adjust to new work practices, staff at all levels have a unique opportunity right now to shape how educational institutions operate in post-pandemic society. This is a moment for individual and collective leadership.

Conference sessions in this stream might consider:

  • The changing profile of professional staff in the tertiary education sector
  • Pay equality, precariousness and casualisation
  • The employee experience: supporting and developing the whole person
  • Regenerating your team culture
  • Leading through crisis and change
  • Women in leadership
  • Strategies for rebuilding and reinvigorating the sector
  • Managing high expectations with fewer staff and less resources



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