The challenges of tomorrow? They’re complex. Gnarly. Undefined. They’ll be driven by social and technological disruption, by the emergence of new disciplines and a world of work where the vast majority of jobs don’t even exist yet.
World-first degrees
UTS: Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation
A degree like no other. (Instrumental Music Plays)
Cutaway to students working in groups, presenting to peers and academics in an open lecture theatre.
Dominica Ingui (BA Communications (Public Communication), B Creative Intelligence and Innovation)
"I decided on Creative Intelligence because I thought it was something really new, and interesting about Uni. I wasn't looking for anything traditional out of my degree, i was looking for something... for something unique and something to set me apart from the rest of the graduates."
Cutaway to students doing group work, sitting around tables with large flat-screen monitors and working in collaborative classrooms. One male student giving a presentation.
Tommaso Armstrong (B Engineering (Hons), B Creative Intelligence and Innovation)
"The difference with the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation is that it allows you, sort of to more play with ideas and its a lot more fluid. They haven't taught us any facts, they've taught us ways to look at problems and then set us up with things to go and look at and research."
Cutaway to students in discussion in collaborative workspace. One student taking notes on a laptop computer.
Professor Anne Cranny-Francis Professor, Cultural Studies Program
"In designing this course, we are coming from the viewpoint that many people have arrived at these days... That the problems that we have in our society, in every society in the world and globally, are so big and so complex that they can't be answered by any one discipline. That what we need are teams of people bringing the knowledges and skills that they have from each of their own disciplines together, to solve these major problems."
Cutaway to students attending a workshop, being briefed in creative agency "The Hallway"
Dr Julia Prior Senior Lecturer, School of Software
"So the course was designed by people from across seven different faculties and the students that can do the course at present, are from eighteen core degrees across the seven faculties."
Cutaway to student cohort on site in "The Hallway" creative agency, being briefed for a project.
Annabel Vici - (B Science, B Creative Intelligence and Innovation)
"One of the things that they really stress is the importance of collaborating with people from other disciplines, and they call it a transdisciplinary degree because they educate us in the methods, and ways of thinking of the other disciplines. It really opens up possiblities for solutions."
Cutaway to student field trip inside ABC recording studios.
Dominica Ingui: "Creative Intelligence doesn't really feel like Uni... It feels like i am genuinely working on real projects with the friends that i have made here, and there's just a lot of support from the Lecturers. They don't feel like superiors to you, everyone is on an equal grounding here, everyone's voices are heard and all of the possibilities that we come up with as young people, all of those possibilities are exhausted."
Cutaway to students working with an academic, students at tables deconstructing small electronic devices with screwdrivers to investigate the way that they function inside. Students making presentations with presentation slides displayed on large screens in lecture theatre setting.
Michael Northey (B Design in Architecture, B Creative Intelligence and Innovation)
"The BCII is real world problems, and real world possibilities and i think that working with clients such as ABC and Google which we are currently doing in our summer school - really enables students to have that kind of perspective on what its like to work in real life.
Cutaway to set of ABC KIDS TV show "Giggle and Hoot" with BCII students observing filming of the show. Students in lecture theatre giving presentations for workshop with Google.
Cutaway to diagrams made with post-it-notes and students collaborating with a representative from Google as facilitator. Some students speaking into microphone as part of class discussion.
Michael Northey: " I think a student who would really benefit from BCII, is one who wants to be extended in their learning opportunities and really go outside of the traditional kind of classroom structure that you get."
Eleanor Crumpton (B Design in Integrated Product Design, B Creative Intelligence and Innovation)
"I would definitely recommend BCII to people who are looking for more than just the standard degree, who are really looking for things to add to the real world, (and take sic.) people who are ambitious, people who want to network and really make the most of their lives."
Tommaso Armstrong: "I can already tell its going to be invaluable experience to me and its going to allow me to look at the world differently, and give me a unique perspective on things."
Closing title - Copywright 2015 - The University of Technology Sydney (Music ends).
Filmed by Anna Zhu on location at UTS and where specified, student field trips for BCII to The ABC Studios Ultimo, Sydney and The Hallway Sydney.
To prepare for these challenges, graduates will need high-level transdisciplinary problem-solving skills and an innovation mindset. Enter the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation (BCII).
The BCII is a combined qualification designed to equip students for this changing career landscape; creating new value through transdisciplinary problem-solving, combining expertise across knowledge domains in order to tackle wicked problems.
“The BCII generates an intensely productive learning environment for creative ideas to emerge through imaginative, problem- and possibility-centred experiences,” says Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Education and Students) Professor Shirley Alexander.
“BCII students become resilient and adaptive, ready to face major challenges and identify new opportunities in an increasingly complex world.”
Unlike traditional university course structures, which tend to be focused on a single discipline area, the BCII is built on the concept of multidisciplinary teamwork. It can be paired with 26 UTS degrees, bringing together students from a vast range of professional background to engage with novel approaches to learning.
“Students participate in activities such as think tanks and hot housing days, methods sandpits, hackathons and co-creation sessions,” Alexander says.
BCII students working collaboratively and engaging in a wide variety of learning experiences.
But the BCII is about much more than what happens in the classroom — one of its aims is to ‘reimagine’ education by positioning it at the intersection of academia and industry. As such, the BCII has extensive links to both public and private sector industry organisations, including Accenture, Google, Food Innovation Partners, NSW Health, and TAL, Australia’s largest insurance company.
In fact, it’s largely an industry-facing degree — much of the course content is structured around solving real problems that these industry partners are grappling with.
Previous projects include a Google challenge to introduce the internet to 200 million people in rural India, and a City of Sydney project to reduce alcohol-related violence in Sydney’s Kings Cross neighbourhood. A recent project with Visa saw students designing the future of electronic payments using wearable technologies and connected devices.
With these transdisciplinary degrees, you’re not learning what someone else has discovered — you are doing real live work on real live problems, says Alexander.
Last year we had a waiting-list of industries that wanted our students to work on their problems and issues.
Now entering its sixth year, the BCII is going from strength to strength. So popular is the degree that 3784 students applied for 250 places in 2017; only one in 15 was successful.
Its reputation in international circles is growing too: the course was jointly awarded a bronze award in the Presence Learning category with Falmouth University in the UK by Wharton Re-imagine Education — a prestigious international competition rewarding innovative initiatives aimed at enhancing student learning outcomes and employability, often described as 'the Oscars of education’. This award recognises classroom innovations that enhance the student learning experience, in response to the idea that "reimagining education involves more than devising ingenious technological solutions to problems".
The BCII is one of a new suite of degrees at UTS that are focused firmly on the future. Along with the Bachelor of Technology and Innovation and the snapshot Diploma of Innovation, which present creative thinking as essential components of a successful tech career, these courses are about developing an innovation mindset that can be applied to the problems of tomorrow.