UTS Careers Advisers and Teachers Day provides a unique opportunity to learn first-hand about UTS course updates, and ask our staff questions – all designed to help you better inform your students of their university and pathway options.
The event is now complete for this year. Our next Careers Advisers and Teachers Day will be held in 2025.
If you were not able to attend the event this year or would like a re-cap of the panel sessions and presentations, the recordings and other resources are now available.
Keynote presentation
Speaker 1
Good morning. So what I want you to do is turn to the person sitting next to you and start off by just, we're not gonna do that. I was waiting for the collective sigh of “I hate Ice Breakers.” Isn't it weird like in COVID we somehow invented the way of doing that online. It's like let's go into breakout rooms and everyone just goes. Ugh. I'm Keith and I'm really looking forward to chatting to you a little bit about student experience. But what I thought we'd do, is start off with something a little bit different. I grant that this might seem an unconventional place to start. Especially when we're accustomed to guiding students to higher education as a default pathway to success. But I thought it'd be interesting to explore at the beginning some reasons why you shouldn't go to university, although of course, considering the audience here. But who's here? Perhaps this is a better way of putting it. Why you shouldn't tell your students to go to university. Let's get started.
That's an ivory tower. It's important to acknowledge the perception that universities are often seen as these ivory towers, institutions that are isolated from the real world and its current issues and trends. Of course, it's not universally true, but there is a kernel of truth in that criticism. And sometimes academic environments can seem to lag behind the rapidly evolving world and the rapidly evolving job market and the changes that we're all facing thanks to technology. What that means for students is that they often feel unprepared for the world of work once they start working. Universities can also seem like empty, soulless places. I'm not saying that universities are devoid of passion or academic fervour or anything like that. Just that the rather large and impersonal nature of many institutions often leaves students feeling like they're just another number. Thanks to the government, they've all got their unique student identifier. They really are just another number. The lack of personalised attention and mentorship, especially after they've left a high school where they often receive that in spades, can lead to a sense of isolation, a lack of engagement and disassociation from the broader academic community. Additionally, people are I think, quite rightly beginning to question the relevance of university education. We've all got those wonderful devices that we're addicted to, that we look up everything and anything at all the time and when information is so easily accessible and industries are evolving at such an unprecedented pace, perhaps a traditional four-year degree is not going to provide the most efficient or relevant learning pathway. Four years is an awfully long time for something that you could learn on YouTube. There are numerous alternative education models: we've all heard of coding boot camps or online courses, situational or cognitive apprenticeships, and those kinds of things. Perhaps they provide a more direct path to employment in certain fields. It's also worth considering that perhaps the university curricula doesn't align with real world applications. There's that gap between academic theory and practical utility. Students often find that much of what they learn isn't really directly applicable to their day-to-day work and their chosen careers. I was talking to someone from KPMG lately who said yeah, yeah, they can do a degree and then they'll come to us and we'll train them properly. This disconnect can lead to frustration in the sense that time and financial investment in a university education might not have been worth it. And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it's crucial to recognise that perhaps university education isn't suitable for everyone. Some students might have other life circumstances or commitments, family responsibilities, health issues, financial constraints. All of these make attending university challenging, if not impossible. And the structured and theoretical nature of university learning doesn't always suit everyone either, so perhaps it's not in everyone's interests to go to university. Do you agree with me?
All right, anyone know what this is? OK, that's how the evil, homicidal artificial intelligence from 2001 Space Odyssey, the famous movie who ends up killing all of the space astronauts, that kind of thing. The reason I'm putting Hal up there is because that's what the AI told me to say. All of those four reasons about irrelevance are out of date, not suitable for everyone. I typed it into ChatGPT because, you know, I always do that. I think that's kind of interesting in this day and age, and that's what it came up with. These are the reasons why you wouldn't go to university. All the pictures it generated for me as well, you might have noticed there's that little bit of blurring though they're a little bit dodgy. If you spotted that. And then I put this slide up to talk about artificial intelligence and you know, do the big reveal. But I discovered recently that a lot of people like I don't get it, like Keith is that from The Simpsons? Like no, no, it's from a movie. I mean, on the face of it, those claims a lot of you were nodding along, right? You've heard it all before. I've certainly heard, read about it in the Daily Telegraph. I've heard it from students, and I've heard it from industry people. I've heard it from teachers. There is some truth. But just like almost everything else that ChatGPT and all these generative AI engines produce, there's a hefty dose of hallucination involved as well, and I want to dive into that and critically examine each one of those claims and think about do they actually apply to us here at UTS or not?
But before I do that, I should introduce myself. Thanks, Jack, for the introduction. As I said, I'm a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. I call that my Muppet photo because it kind of looks like someone's got their hand up the back of me and is controlling me. I promise you I'm real, OK. Unlike the ChatGPT before, I used to be a teacher. So I know where you're all coming from. I worked in schools, independent schools, Catholic schools, public schools in Australia and the United Kingdom. And after that I was a worker for one of the teaching unions. And then the reason I'm here I became an independent learning designer and now I coordinate the Master of Teaching secondary here at UTS and a couple of other things as well. It is true about the ukulele though, right? All right, what I want to talk to you today is about student experience. Now student experience is one of those kinds of emotionless terms that we learning designers love to use. But I'm using it in this context to talk about the totality of everything that happens at university from the very first thought you have about “I think I should go to university,” to that first conversation, to the first time you click on the website and try to navigate your way through to the enrollment page. All the way through to graduation. And then maybe beyond that as well? But I'm going to do it a little bit differently in case you haven't worked that out already. There's nothing worse than a standard presentation about student experience frameworks, and I could tell you what each one of these means and how we devised all of that, but I figure that's not really what you're here for today. Instead, what I want to do is contextualise this presentation, by telling you a little bit about how each of those different parts of those frameworks looks in practice and relate that back to some of those criticisms about university education as provided by ChatGPT. We are going to talk about engagement, belonging, wellbeing partnerships, all of those kinds of things. But instead, we're going to look at practical examples at UTS. Now I should mention that I'm an academic in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Some of my examples are probably going to relate to that, but I do get around the university a lot, so I'm going to talk about things from all over the university. It's not a representative sample. I'm only presenting these examples just to give you an idea of the diversity of the kinds of things that are happening at the university and how they all contribute to this idea of student experience. I'm making this important point. I'm sure we're all familiar with the notion that the sum is greater than the parts, and I'm sure I've heard it in in every Marvel Universe movie. But I think it's also true of university education. Of course, the most important thing is what happens in the classrooms and the lecture halls and the laboratories and in the library and all those other kinds of places. But that's only one part of the whole university experience. It is entirely feasible but probably not enjoyable to undertake a university level qualification as a series of short courses offered by an organisation like Coursera. I won't tell you what the dropout rate for that kind of programme is, but it's stratospheric. There must be something else to think about when we think about the university experience. And we call that the student experience; the in-classroom experience is sustained and supported, developed and enriched by what happens everywhere else in the university campus. Physically. And virtually. All of these things add up to the student experience. All right. So, let's get into it. The first claim was that universities are ivory towers, so if we dive into that a little bit more, this is the suggestion that universities are somehow isolated from the rest of the world. They don't do the real world, they exist in a kind of intellectual bubble where they are detached from practical issues and social. That's a criticism in and of itself, but it has serious repercussions for students, especially for students thinking about going to university or what they enjoy about university.
So why on Earth would you go and learn from people that are only tangentially in contact with the real world? And how on Earth can you possibly learn anything that's going to be of use to you when you go out into the real world when these people don't live in it themselves? Well, I don't think that's the case at UTS. Part of the UTS Student Experience framework is partnerships and as you can see on the slide, we're talking about partnerships, but not just partnerships between academics and students or academics and academics. We're talking about partnerships between academics and industry, students and the industry. Students and students and lots more. Of course, all of our subjects and our courses and our programs are designed with this notion of industry partnerships. We often use the term being close to practise or industry based, and what I'm going to do is say, don't just take my word for it. Let me give you a few examples of what I'm talking about. And I've drawn these examples of things that are external to the university courses. Let's dive into the first one, which is the Apple foundations program. So, we're all aware that there's this huge push for STEM education in schools, which I think is an interesting idea. And when I was a teacher, I was always the person who ran the coding club and also the social justice or the Environmental Club. And we talked about the kinds of problems that students would face and nine times out of 10, the solution was we need an app. And of course, that's not the real solution, but it just showed the headspace of where the students were at right. But it raised a point. I don't know the first thing about writing an app or building an app or putting it on the App Store or the Google marketplace or whatever, but I know students. Whether they're the students who can foresee a career in software design and development, or it's the students who want to go and be eco lawyers or something like that can all see the benefit of knowing a little bit about how to code. Not necessarily professionally, but to know a little bit about it. Well, that's what the Apple Foundations program does here at UTS. We were the first university in Australia to offer the Apple foundations program. There's only one other university down in Melbourne that does it at the moment, but the whole idea is that the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology will allow students to go from their first line of code to their first app on the App Store. And they do it in about four weeks. So, it's a challenge-based learning environment and learners experience the creative process of what it takes to solve real world problems. They collaborate in teams, and they design apps using the Apple iOS ecosystem. It empowers learners with a future thinking skill set that prioritises technology, creativity and entrepreneurship. Some of the students who completed this course designed an app that allowed students to find places to donate used clothes, so it was a kind of a social justice mission against fast fashion. Another group, just for fun created a modern version of, do you remember the tamagotchis, the digital pets that people used to have? One of those on your iPhone as opposed to on a little keyring. The great thing about this Apple foundations course is that it's open to anyone at UTS, so if you're enrolled in law or design or the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences or the Faculty of Engineering and IT, you can enrol and you can do this course and get the benefit of the focused attention. And you walk out of there with your first app, hopefully on the App Store. I mean, if that's not a real-world partnership, I don't really know what it is. And even more exciting. It's now available to school students. Over the last couple of sessions, we've had a number of schools come in and participate in designing their own app. It's a shortened programme. It's only three weeks long, but at the end they get their own app on the App Store.
All right, let's move on. I want to talk to you about international opportunities. As an example of partnerships. It gets me so excited that video, I love it. So this is a highlight experience of being a student at UTS is the opportunity to have an international adventure. They usually call it international experience. They're like, don't call it an adventure, Keith, but I think it's an adventure. OK, we have partnerships with more than 40 different countries, 200 institutions. And we stand by the idea that we want as many of our students as possible to have an international experience during their time at UTS, whether that is a full six month placement in another country and the countries are off the top of my head, Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain. In Switzerland, lots of countries in Latin America as well, you know, so pretty diverse. Or whether it's as part of one of our shorter programs. We have six-week programs that are that are much more focused, but we also have what's called the Build Program. So the build program is about developing international leadership amongst young people and it provides a recognized and respected credential that students can do in addition to their normal studies. So, when they leave UTS with their Bachelor of Business or whatever and they've got this build credential, you know they're a build leader on their CV. It's a pretty impressive achievement. All right, so ivory towers, not so much.
Alright. The second claim was that universities are empty and soulless. Most Australian universities are really big in terms of student numbers. OK, a lot of them have in excess of 30,000 students and that means that as a student you can actually feel like no one really knows who you are. You're just that unique student identifier number. This is made even worse if there are some really convoluted or arcane systems that you have to navigate to enrol in classes or to get advice or to just solve a problem with your computer or something like that. Universities often spread over wide campuses as well. That means that sometimes universities can feel quite empty. There were days shortly after the COVID lockdown where I sometimes felt like I was the only person on campus here. But I don't think that you can make the claim that UTS is empty or soulless part of the student framework experience framework is belonging. And all members of UTS, and crucially, including students as part of this discussion, work hard to build that sense of belonging in the Community. It takes a lot of different forms and I think that illustrates a really important point. A little bit later on, I'll talk about the relevance of universities and whether they're becoming irrelevant in the modern era. But what I want to talk about here is that students have capacity and do it as well to show leadership here at UTS about improving the student experience for everyone.
Let me give you a couple of examples. The most obvious one, of course, is the vast number of UTS student societies that exist. OK, I'm not exaggerating when I say we have Everything from A the aerospace society to W, the water polo team, or the women in STEM group, and Y, the Young Australian Lebanese Association, we don't quite have Z yet, but I'm sure it won't be long until there is an association with Z in the name. These are fantastic opportunities for young people to find their people, whatever their interest is, I'm sure that students are going to find something that will help them here at UTS. Let me give you an example. My niece and she's only allowed me to tell this story if I promised I won't say the faculty or her name, but my niece is enrolled here. She's a second-year student here at UTS and she's from Yas. OK, Yas is about an hour and a half from Canberra. Maybe 3 hours by car from Sydney and she came here alone by herself to study. She's a country girl. She likes fishing and camping and shooting, but we won't talk about the shooting side of things. Let's just stick to the fishing and camping. She said to me when she was talking about it on her first day, she was worried that she was going to be isolated. She was worried she was going to be the only person from the country. The only person who liked those kinds of things, and she wouldn't fit in with the rest of the cohort who are studying here. I said I'll take you around for O-week. And on during o-week, we wandered around, had a look at all the societies and within two minutes she found the UTS Camping Society. Since then, she's been on camping trips. Suddenly she's got a readymade group of friends. Now, of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that she's going to perform better in her course. It's not as simple as a cause-and-effect kind of thing, but something that we do know and this is the reason why we spend so much time talking about belonging, is that if students feel like they belong on campus, they do perform better. There are much fewer dropouts and much greater academic success. And it's also the right thing to do, right? One of the phrases that I really like is we talk about having a sticky campus. OK we want students to come here and kind of get stuck. You know, in a good way. All right, let me give you another example of what I'm talking about in terms of belonging. We also offer the UTS Soul award. So this is something that's been developed by the Centre for Social Justice and inclusion and what we wanted to do was recognise that we've got lots of young leaders and young activists and young volunteers, and not so young as well who want to give it a chance to show off what they can do, and so the soul award is an opportunity for people to be recognised for the volunteering and community work that they do. So again, it sits outside your normal study program, but if you volunteer and you support and you work as part of a group, you can get an accredited qualification, a recognition at two different levels. We've got the soul award and the soul badge that says yes over the course of your time here at university, you have learned about ethical leadership and project management and supporting others. All those kinds of related skills, those 21st century skills that are very popular at the moment and the university will recognise it with an accreditation. There's lots of training and all kinds of things involved. My favourite example are the people that go out and do all the recycling here as part of the soul award. Fantastic stuff. The criticism was that universities are empty and soulless places. I don't agree with that. I mean, we've got the soul part even in the name of one of our programs, so we can't be soulless, all right.
Moving on, another criticism that you often hear about universities is becoming irrelevant. This is the idea that the four-year university or three-year university degree isn't necessary to succeed in life anymore. You're better off learning things from YouTube or Coursera or LinkedIn learning or whatever. In fact, you don't really need any kind of accredited qualification because you can watch a YouTube video and then become an influencer, and you're guaranteed to be successful. When I was a teacher My hate watch, you know, the thing that you watch to make you really angry on social media. All these teacher-preneurs on Instagram. Do you know teacher-preneurs? I hate that term, but these are people who have quit their teaching job because they are, you know, selling resources or they've got affiliate marketing links and all kinds of things going on in their Instagram posts. But it's the world that young people are growing up in and I think it's an interesting world anyway. It's true that there are a lot of different approaches out there to what learning might look like, and I think that's a good thing. As a learning designer, I'm excited by the prospect of short courses and micro-credentials, micro-learning, you know, learning on the go, learning on the job just in time, all those kinds of buzzwords that we hear about all the time. And certainly, there's a lot of research suggesting that there are benefits to this. I think there's also benefits to the traditional university experience. And so what I'm interested in about in terms of engagement in student experience is how we've taken some of these ideas and things and found ways for them to fit within the UTS Student Experience Framework, so I'm going to give you 2 really straightforward examples. The first one and the really big one is UTS Startups. So UTS Startups is the home for entrepreneurship at UTS. Lots of universities have similar programs, but UTS is the biggest and the best. We have more than 600 ongoing startups across the university at all different stages of the startup life cycle, so some have gone to market already, some have raised money; some are still very much in the early stages. Any student at UTS and staff member can join the startup program for free. They get access to the two buildings that are devoted to startups. They get access to all the training, they get access to the meeting rooms. There's a podcast room where you can record a podcast if you want. There's a zen meditation room if you need to chill out from your startup for a little while. And the most important, well not the most important thing, but the thing that I'm most excited about, the startup program is that they also get access to what's called the rapid value creation program. So this is an 8 week crash course, introduction to E commerce and digital marketing. So over 8 weeks 1 mission per week, students learn about things like drop shipping, headless Youtube or faceless Youtubes affiliate marketing, Etsy print on demand. Amazon Low and no content book publishing and lots more. We have students who have made enough money to cover their accommodation for a year on the back of this RVC program. Now that's not what it's about, it's an introduction, but it's kind of exciting that it works right. Even more exciting, just like the Apple Foundations program. We also offer the rapid value creation program to schools. There's a modified version that we will offer to schools for free.
Another example of our engagement, and this is kind of related to keeping people relevant, is something that we offer in the initial teacher education program. When I was a a teacher, one of the things that I had to do was look off to the new teachers to the school and at that point we were a Google school. And What I had to do was teach them all how to use. Google and I was like “Oh my goodness, why on Earth are they not teaching you this kind of thing at university?” Almost every school in Australia has got some kind of Google platform or Microsoft, or you know, whichever one we want to talk about doesn't matter. So, when I became the Master of Teaching, sorry, the course coordinator for the Master of Teaching Secondary, that's something that we put into place. So, it's optional, but all students who do the Master of Teaching secondary and the Master of Teaching primary when it gets up and running will have the opportunity to get accreditation as a Google for Education champion. They just rebranded themselves. They used to be called Google certified innovators and then Google certified teachers. So that's what we're talking about. It's an introduction to how to use Google, pedagogically and technologically. It makes a difference when you leave university and you are confident in your technological skills, so you can focus on learning the craft of being a teacher. It also looks really good. It also looks really good on your CV when you're applying for a job. It separates you from everyone else who might just have a Bachelor of Education or something. We also offer a similar program called the Adobe Creative Educator Program Level One free online. Every public school in NSW has access to some of the Adobe tools and I know a lot of the independent and non-government schools do as well. Preparing teachers to be good when they walk through the door of their first day on the job.
Alright, what about the final criticism? And this was the one that really annoyed me when I read it from ChatGPT. This was the idea that university isn't for everybody. If you got family commitments, if you got work commitments, if you live a long way from university, maybe you should give it a miss. I have to be honest, that kind of view. Is still common in many higher education institutions. We design learning experiences with the perfect student in mind. And that perfect student, more often than not, is white, male, English speaking middle class doesn't have much of a job if they have a job at all, doesn't live far from the university, or lives on campus and doesn't have dependents or family commitments. I have to be honest, I don't know any students that fit the mold of the perfect student anymore. So, wouldn't it make more sense to design with these diverse students in mind rather than this ideal that never actually happens? Well, that's what we're trying to do at UTS, with the wellbeing part of the school engagement framework. I'm just going to tell you about two of these things. You're going to laugh when you watch some of these videos because you're going to go oh my goodness, schools have been doing that for 20 years or longer. And of course you have, but it's also new for the university sector.
HELPS Video
Speaker
I love the focus on belonging, open doors, helping people. Well, so that HELPS, available to all students. Another example is the Maths and Science Study Centre. What we've noticed is that especially amongst first year students and I'm talking mostly about students who might be doing a subject like nursing where they have to do a first-year science subject as part of that, there's often a real gap between their level of mathematical or scientific knowledge from school and what's required at university. And what we found is that they need extra support, so Science and Maths academics set up the Maths and Science Study Centre, which is a drop-in centre or an online consultation to provide students with the extra support that they need just to get over the line so they can successfully complete that first year science subject or that first year Maths subject and we can kind of erase that gap that exists there. That's engagement and wellbeing. So, we've talked about engagement, belonging, wellbeing and partnerships. The only thing that I want to add to that is that this is long term. There's a temporal aspect to this, OK, we're interested in the whole lifelong experience. One of the things that we do in the School of International Studies and Education is we offer a lot of micro credentials. So, these are single subjects that are stand alone. You pay upfront, you come along, and you do it. And it's wonderful to see so many of our teacher education students. After a couple of years, they come back and they say have you got anything on learning analytics because we're talking about that at my school and we can say come along and do Crunch! Or they say I need to up my skills on multimedia design, can you help me? We can say come along and do Create. Once students graduate that's not the end, that's just the next step in the relationship. I just wanted to finish with this slide because this is the slide that I talked about contextualising. Now we all know that that famous phrase that you know you might forget what your teacher taught you, but you'll never forget how they made you feel. And it's a truism, but it is true, and obviously we hope that you don't forget what you learned at university. But I think the emotional part of it, of your learning experience of the student experience is really important, both for your own well-being and growth as a as a person, but also for your academic success. And that's why I wanted to talk about all of these ideas that exist outside of our formal programs and courses. Thank you.
Dr Keith Heggart, a former high school teacher is a Senior Lecturer at the School of International Studies and Education. Keith offers invaluable insights into UTS through the unique lens of his work.
Panel session: Course updates
Speaker 1
I'm going to be inviting my colleague Yahya, also one of those guys behind the email, as well as a host of guests to moderate our first panel session on the UTS course updates for 2024. Reminder that if you have any questions during the panel, please submit them on slider. The code is today's date. And to follow up the Wi-Fi question, the Wi-Fi which you should be logging into is UTS guest and there will be an option that comes down which asks whether you're at a conference or not. And the password for that day is CAT day, capital CAT Capital DAY 0324. Thank you, Yahya.
Speaker 2
Hi everyone so I work alongside Jack as you may have seen, if you've done anything relating to career markets or campus workshops. You've seen my name on the other side, so I hope that you guys can recognise me now and put a face to the name, but you can now obviously get to the good stuff and the important stuff of the day when it comes to the course updates, so a lot of you actually have a flyer that has the course updates and listings on them. So, you can actually pop that out while they are going over this for today. We have a lot of academics here today that will take you through each faculty and the updates that are happening across them. Whenever you guys are ready, we'll take you through it so. We'll pass it on to Anurag, who will introduce himself and give us the updates he has for business.
Speaker 3
Thank you. Hi, everyone, good morning. Welcome to UTS and today's event. My name is Anurag Hingorani and I'm the Bachelor of Business director. We have a limited time, so I'll just be providing 2 quick updates. The 1st update is that we have a new second major in the Bachelor of Business. It's called business data analytics. Students can undertake this new second major in conjunction with a business major. From the second year, as you know, in the first year, students do core subjects, but they can undertake the second major in conjunction with the business major. The next update and an additional point related to this is that business data analytics is a field that's in great demand. You know, organisations are relying on data driven insights for decision making and graduates who have these data analytics skills are used or provide assistance to businesses to help derive value from their data. In the business data analytics major, students master techniques for creating, storing, managing large volumes of data. It's not just a quick short survey, it's large volumes of data from diverse sources. They also develop skills to analyse and visualise their data into meaningful insights, and they learn how to translate those insights into useful business strategies. Students also explore the cutting-edge technologies which you know of artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve complex business problems. The second point, the 2nd update is that the Business School has received EQUIS accreditation, which places us among the top 1% of business schools worldwide. So prospective students benefit from being associated with the UTS Business School, which has received recognition, global recognition for excellence in business, research and education. They also are then learning in a reputable and prestigious environment. I think my 2 minutes might be up so I might pass this on to my colleague Mick from the Business School as well.
Speaker 2
Amazing. So introduce yourself and give us the course update you'd like to share
Speaker 4
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. My name is Meg Hibbins and I'm the director of the Bachelor of Management in the Business School. My biggest update this year, I guess, is that we have launched 2 new majors we've added to our suite of major opportunities for students. Our existing majors of course, event management, sport business and digital creative enterprise. This year, very awaited launching of two new majors. The first one is sustainability and social impact. It's an incredible opportunity for school leavers and business folk of the future to get involved in creating the change that they want to see. We find that already that the students coming in are really excited about taking part in those changes and they've got some very clear ideas of what they'd like those to be. There's a focus on leadership in terms of change for these courses, and it's a very versatile career path because it really does equip students with a wide range of skills and exposure to, you know, strategic thinking, ethics decision making and of course the sustainability and social change options. The second one is strategic innovation and entrepreneurship, and again launched this year. Great take up already. Students are already telling us they've got entrepreneurship ideas and they're ready to get involved in the innovation space. We work very closely with the transdisciplinary faculty, and we are able to leverage a number of their subjects so that our students are able to take part in mid-session activity. While the Business School runs an autumn and a spring session through the TD School our Strategic innovation, and Entrepreneurship students do autumn, winter and summer subjects, which allows them to lighten the load a little bit during our regular semester. From a strategic innovation perspective, it's definitely more focused on critical thinking and design thinking. We're really looking at solution-oriented approaches to organisational issues and to societal issues that need innovation and are right for change. The programs of all of our programs this year, very proud in the Bachelor of Management, have grown. We're very happy with the way that our degree is being placed and students coming in are very excited about their opportunities in the future. Thank you.
Speaker 2
So much. Thank you so much for that. So I'll pass it on to Philip to talk more about arts, social sciences and the update that you have
Speaker 5
Hi. Thanks very much. My name is Phillip Birch and I'm the lead for criminology and the Faculty of Arts and Social Science. I'm here to talk about the new offering we've got in the criminology program with psychology, but I think there might be some mileage in actually just reflecting on criminology as a whole at the university, because it is a brand-new degree really. It kicked off in 2022 and in that short space of time we've gone from no students to over 500 students. I think that has something to say about the brand of criminology that we're offering at this university because of the skill set of the staff that work in it, not talking about myself though only. So what is criminology? Criminology is effectively the study of crime and disorder, threats to public safety and security. And through the degree we are looking at understanding and explaining crime and those who are affected by it, as well as the responses to, so looking at prevention, disruption, reduction and also the institutional responses; police, courts, corrections so on and so forth. Criminology is such a multidisciplinary space, and that is reflected in the offerings that we have. We started with about 5 offerings back in 2022. We've gone now to 9 specialisations in the bachelor of criminology. The double degree with psychology being the latest offering. So you can study. Criminology here at UTS several ways through a three-year degree and you can do that with a major, your specialisation or an extended major. They're in data analytics, justice and legal studies and forensics. There's also digital forensics extended major, as well as a data analytics and research extended major. All three year pathways. We then have a spattering of four year pathways and they're all double degrees. You can do criminology alongside forensic science, cybersecurity which was only introduced last year. That's taken off exceptionally well, as you'd probably expect. We've got obviously our psychology degree for four years, but we've also got the International Studies degree as a combination with criminology, which has run over the five years.
Just bringing it back to psychology, what's the uniqueness of it? Well, not only because of our brand of criminology that we offer and that applied translational criminology that we employ here, but what the double degree with Psych does is it allows a deeper examination exploration of human behaviour, crime and criminality. For students that were moving down that pathway, we would probably be looking at them moving off to work with offenders and/or victims, whether that's in a court setting, prisons, community corrections to name but a few and the type of work that they're involved with there would be around risk assessment, treatment work. I've been a criminologist for 26 years. I've never been a psychologist, but just going back to that point about the multidisciplinary nature of our field. Never been a psychologist, but worked in risk assessment and treatment work when I worked over in the British prison service, both with young offenders and maximum secure adults, and so the interface for want of a better phrase with criminology is unbelievable, and whether you've got an interest in criminology as a profession. What you can certainly say is that crime disorder will touch everybody's life at some point, whether you know someone who's been a victim, whether you've been offending yourself, who sped down the road today on the way here. Or whether you've been called for jury service in some shape or form. Criminology touches the lives of all of us in some shape or form, and I think what we offer here at UTS is that real world industry focused program. We don't hate the police. We don't want to abolish prisons. We see ourselves as critical friends to the criminal justice system. They don't get everything right, but they don't get everything wrong either. And I think it's about having that more balanced, nuanced, measured understanding. And what I've found interesting from the young people coming through is their ability to engage with that premise so that fills me with a lot of joy around potential future practitioners in our field in the future. So if there any questions, I'll be outside in a bit
Speaker 2
So we're going to get questions so they can send questions anytime through slide or just a reminder and we'll answer them for you. If we don't get to them, we will be releasing a FAQ for everyone, so I'll pass this on to Rick and what would you like to share when it comes to the education sector?
Speaker 6
My name's Rick Flowers. I'm a lead in the field of education here at UTS. We've been offering teacher education programs for 30 years. We have secondary teacher education and primary teacher education. What I'm going to talk about is the primary teacher education program because we've introduced a fairly significant change to the way we do it. The most common way to for school leavers to become a primary school teacher is to do a four year bachelor of education. That's what we used to offer. Starting next year, we'll be offering a new four year program that is a Bachelor of Education Futures and a Master of Teaching in Primary. The advantage is that they'll be getting 2 qualifications and moreover, they'll be getting a Masters qualification in that four year program. The other advantage of this new combined program is that we're also trying to reach out to those school leavers who are hedging their bets, who are pretty interested in the possibility of being a primary school teacher, but are not quite sure. What our program offers is an exit point. For those who decide they're not cut out to be a school teacher after they've gone into schools, we place them in schools, in classrooms with supervising teachers, and they might decide, look, I'm not cut out to be a school teacher. Or they may decide look, I actually want to move into environmental education, or I want to move into the field of social policy and so on. The Bachelor of Education Futures is an attractive qualification in its own right. In this program there is the Master of teaching component in which we're offering subjects that are prescribed by the External Accreditation Authority here in NSW. They study all the key learning areas such as science and technology, Maths and English, Human society and the environment, creative arts. In the bachelor of education futures, it's a degree I suppose you could say it's perhaps it's like a Bachelor of Arts, but we're in a University of Technology and it has that flavour to it. There are subjects about sustainability, environment, about new technologies, working with communities and so on. So that's the big update at UTS is that we've reconfigured our primary teacher education program and we're offering a pretty good product.
Speaker 2
Amazing. So Nabin, what do you want to take us through when it comes to the information technology sector?
Speaker 7
I’m Nabin Sharma from the School of Computer Science and also the director of Bachelor of AI and Master of AI programs. We started this Bachelor of AI program literally last year. But before we jump into the program itself, I would like to share some insights about what's happening with AI and I think we are all aware of, you know, what's happening with AI. But let's try to understand, you know, what is the market size it's going to be. The current trends shows that it's going to grow to be a $20 trillion market by end of, sorry, $2 trillion, my apologies by end of 2030 and in Australia itself, we are going to need around more than 160,000 skilled AI professionals and we already have a shortage in that area. If we have to understand what's happening with the startup ecosystem, more and more startups are actually using AI in some way or the other to, you know to develop their product, either a new algorithm, a brand new algorithm, or use existing one. So that's where the Bachelor of AI programs comes into picture. It is going to, you know, play a critical role in providing that skilled workforce in the future. This is a three years bachelor's program with 144 credit points. There are a range of core and compulsory subjects which are going to be going to be like providing foundations to the students for advanced AI subjects. The advanced AI subjects would cater domains such as computer vision, natural language processing and some other areas which are really popular in the market now. This program has been crafted with industry experts and this is not only going to provide students or make the students academically more proficient but also ensure that they are ready for solving real world industry challenges and real-world problems. So that's the Bachelor of AI program. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2
So Doctor Sharp, when it comes to the world of health, what updates would you like to share?
Speaker 8
Hi everyone. I'm Albie Sharp. I'm the course director for the Bachelor of Public Health program. We have two really important, exciting updates to share with you. The first one is we changed the name of our course. Some of you who came last year or in previous years might remember that we offered a Bachelor of Health Science, we've changed that to the Bachelor of Public Health because this better reflects what we do in most of our majors. The first thing is to reassure you that the pathway that many of our students want into physiotherapy and ophthalmology and speech pathology are still there. Students taking that major, that's the structure and function major that we offer can still progress through into a Master’s program at the Graduate School of Health here at UTS in those areas as well the preexisting subjects that are required for physiotherapy are still definitely offered as part of that structure and function major. The other really exciting piece of news that we have is that we offer also a major in health promotion and that's now a fully accredited course. Students graduating from the health promotion major will be recognised by the Australian Health Promotion Association, as fully accredited health promotion practitioners. So that's very exciting as well.
The other majors also remain the same. We offer indigenous health, we offer global health we offer population and public health and then there's also a no major for students who want to build up their own kind of course, following their own elective choices. The really exciting thing I think about our degree is that we offer a pathway into health for students who think well, I want to do something with health, but I'm not really sure what I want to do. I don't necessarily want do the blood and gut stuff. Uh, I want to find out what I want to do. So we have students who come in and say, look is this is my pathway into physio. I didn't quite get the marks I wanted and by the end of the degree they've changed their majors, they've become somebody who wants to work for a global organisation promoting health in Myanmar or somewhere in East Africa or something like that. And we have students who want to work with Indigenous communities. We're really looking for students who have a strong social conscience and really want to do something of benefit to their fellow Australians and fellow global community members as well. Finally, we also offer a whole bunch of combined degree courses, in things such as Bachelor of Public Health, Bachelor of Economics, Bachelor of Management, Bachelor of International Studies and Bachelor of Trans Disciplinary Studies and Sustainability and Environment as well. There are lots of different options and lots of different pathways for students to follow. Thank you.
Speaker 2
Thank you. So I'll pass this on to Doctor Seymour. I know a lot of you careers advisor have been dying to know what's happening in the world of psychology, so I'll pass that on.
Speaker 9
Thank you. Yeah. My name is Kylie Seymour and I'm the course director for the new UTS undergraduate psychology programs, which is very exciting. We launched them a couple of weeks ago and our students are really enjoying them from all accounts. And so are the staff as well. It's been a great couple of weeks, and it's been a long process last year getting this course up and running, but we're really proud of what we've built. It’s built quite differently from every other psychology undergrad degree or degrees that's available at the moment. Sorry, I should say we've got a Bachelor of Psychology and a Bachelor of Psychology honours. And as Phil mentioned before as well, we've got double degrees in psychology and criminology, but all of these degrees are very modern and dynamic. We reached out to industry and asked industry what they wanted from psychology graduates, people that learn about behavioural science. We're looking at also making sure that we give our students an idea of all the different career pathways that they can aim for in addition to becoming a clinical psychologist, for instance. A lot of psychology students end up not graduating with the marks or it's just a very competitive process to become a clinician or a clinical psychologist. We're giving our students all these other options and letting them know all the way throughout their degree, what they can do with the skills and knowledge that they're learning, and it's, as I said, very dynamic. The other great thing is, is that we load the courses up right from the start with core psychology subjects. A lot of other degrees that other psychology degrees kind of stagger all the core psychology subjects throughout the three or four years, whereas we give them, we immerse them in psychology from day one. Our students are doing 3 subjects in psychology compared to Sydney that do one for instance. It gives the students an idea right from the start as well, whether psychology is a good fit for them and that's where they want to go. I think that's a real benefit. The other thing is, is that because we've been able to build this from scratch in 2023 and 2024, it means that we are, you know hiring the people that are doing the cutting edge research and are at the forefront of their field, where we're also using all the best practice and applying that to our teaching and everything, so we're listening to what the best practices for an undergraduate psych introductory psych course and we're applying that to our teaching, so I think the students are loving it. We're loving it. It's great. Thanks.
Speaker 2
Thank you. So I'll pass it on to associate professor Scott, would you like to introduce yourself and give us an update on Science
Speaker 10
Yeah, absolutely. So, hi, my name is associate Professor Scott. I'm here to talk to you about the Bachelor of Advanced Science program. Some of you might be thinking this isn't a new program we've had for quite some time. On the surface, it's like a duck. It's been smoothing, going along pretty smoothly for the last few years but underneath there's been a flurry of action and we've changed a few things. We still have different majors within the Bachelor of Advanced Science, so we still offer the pre medicine major, which if you do have any specific questions about what that course might be like, our wonderful MC for this panel is a graduate of that particular program. When he's not running events like this, he is also studying for the GAMSAT, so he can speak quite a lot about that program. The other program we have is the major in pharmaceutical sciences. Again, we've had this one for quite some time, but we have updated it now to provide students with alternate pathways and an opportunity to specialise in either chemistry or biology as part of a sub major. What we have been doing in the background was engaging with industry and finding that while we still can provide a pathway for students to move into a Master of Pharmacy, to move into the traditional pathways. There's a growing demand for graduates with chemistry skills and literacy to move into drug discovery and working for pharmaceutical companies, and, by the same token, students with an understanding of how pharmaceutical, drugs and processes interact with the human body. Providing students with the opportunity to either specialise in chemistry and biology was a way that we could give students the skills that they would need for that whole suite of programs, so really value adding to what we already had. The other major that I would like to speak to you about is a new major that you may not have heard much about, and it's the quantum technology major. This is targeted specifically for students with an interest in that sort of interface between physics and engineering, so over the next 5 to 10 years, quantum technologies will be coming to life. You might have heard things around quantum computing, and we do have some subjects and areas in our engineering faculty that focus on this, we wanted to provide students an opportunity to be at the cutting edge, to work at that interface between science and engineering. The students in this program, they might be students that are really interested in physics but not really sure what they might want to do with it. Well, this is an opportunity for them to demonstrate and be at that cutting edge of this science and technology and so we work quite closely with FEIT to offer a sub major in quantum computing and space and engineering as well. Really providing those students an opportunity if they love physics, and they want to see where it can go to, to give them that opportunity outside of a traditional Bachelor of Science Physics.
Speaker 2
Amazing. Thank you so much for those updates in science. I'll pass on to Mel to share what's happening in the TD school.
Speaker 5
Hi everyone, I'm Mel Indratheb, I'm a program and partnerships manager within TD School which is short for transdisciplinary school. We are very excited to launch our innovation in complex systems micro credentials to NSW Year 10 students. Micro credentials are short certification courses which learners learn new professional skills at a university level, and they're typically offered to working professionals. But in UTS first, TD school is offering micro credentials to high school students, which will enable them to earn undergraduate subject credit that is 6 credit points towards the subject of the same name or a business elective. Our micro focus is on creative problem solving and innovation within the context of climate change and sustainability, and it empowers students to actually write a proposal for their school to help them transition to net zero carbon admissions. Throughout the course, students consult with various UTS departments and our industry partners about new clean technology. They conduct a feasibility study at their school campus and actually write a business case which they present to the general public by the end of the course. We are so excited about the impact that this initiative will have and have seen some great outcomes for our pilot delivery partner Hills Grammar School. We're scaling up and rolling it out much more broadly this year. We will engage directly with schools for group participation and are really pleased to announce we have two upcoming intakes, one on October 21st and one on the 11th of November, each running for 10 consecutive days and each accommodating up to 4 high schools. We would love to see you around the TD school store to talk about how we can collaborate, also connect with us on our LinkedIn where we'll be posting about the micro credential today.
Speaker 2
Thank you so much. So we'll pass that back to Anurag and I'll let you guys know why. I understand we've thrown a lot of information your way. I'll try and break it down for you guys as we now go through some of the questions. I'll pass it on to Anurag with the question of as business analytics can only be offered as a second major, are there any business majors that you would recommend pairing this with.
Speaker 3
That's a good question, as it's a second major any business student doing a business major can choose it. No one is prevented from choosing it. Maybe if you have the mindset for maybe some statistics keeping abreast of technological developments or even a human resource management major student could consider it so no one is prevented from choosing it, but if you look at it, you know there needs to be some skill set or an innate ability in a student to do this kind of subject. You're dealing with large volumes of data. There are statistical techniques involved. You know there's data visualization, interpretation. I don't want to mention majors, but I will, given that you've asked, but I just want to stress the point that even in a management major, student could choose it, but in terms of, since you've asked the question, I would say typically it would be students in accounting, economics, finance and marketing if that answers your question.
Speaker 2
Yeah, absolutely. Unfortunately, we're running very short on time. We might have to keep the questions a bit fast, but you guys have been incredible. So I'll pass this on to Meg. Will students in their new majors be able to complete an internship as part of their course? And if so, what kind of organisations would you expect them to intern with?
Speaker 4
That's also a good question. Yes, of course they can do internships as part of their course. In terms of the type of organisations they could go into the sky's the limit, but our major coordinators for sustainability and social impact, Doctor Lewis Wales and for strategic innovation Doctor Miller Katic both have great connections into industry and we have a lot of industry folks who come along and really generously give their time to do guest lectures and to engage with students. And then lots of students go on to do internships with them. For a sustainability student it could be, uh, if they have an interest in uhm, food waste, it could be AUS harvest or an organisation that has a social mission like 2 good company. From a strategic innovation perspective, there's lots of opportunity in the entrepreneurship space and the startup space. And that could be, you know, any sort of organisation as well as getting involved with their own entrepreneurship and startup activities.
Speaker 2
Amazing. Thank you so much. I'll pass this on to Philip. I know you're very, very passionate about criminology, but I'd like to ask what could be some reasons and motivations for students to undertake criminal psychology?
Speaker 6
Well, I think in part the rise in the media, TV shows and things have been a help and a hindrance in terms of what's real and not in terms of our field and practice. But I think it has generated a lot of interest in criminology. So that's why I think it's important that we have a more honest real accurate reflection about what the discipline in the field is, and I think we strive to do that here at UTS, but students that are wanting to go off and work with the kind of forensic psychology kind of field and space would be probably looking at working directly with offenders, even on a one to one basis or in group work settings, delivery of treatment programs for example within corrections. We've seen the changing face of offender treatment programs since when I started in the 90s to what's on offer now, it has just exploded and we're getting better and better with those types of offender treatment programs that are on offer. Risk assessments are also very much part and parts of that forensic psychology role and students will be finding themselves working in that court space, community corrections, prison space and the drive really about that is around human behaviour and change, basically supporting people through that change process. We talk about in the field resisting and deniers in particular within the sex offender space and those behaviours will exhibit similar behaviours, but the reason for it differs, for somebody denying their offence, someone resisting to change, but they will exhibit similar behaviour. It takes a good practitioner, a skilled practitioner to be able to tease that out because the response to that would be different depending on whether you're dealing with a resistor or a denier, for example. People who are interested in obviously human behaviour wanting to enhance public safety but also interested, obviously in crime prevention, disruption and reduction, which is very much at the heart of what criminology is about.
Speaker 2
Yeah, amazing. That answers it perfectly. I'll pass it on now on to Rick, so I understand. I understand that we now have a primary education program, so the standard course at universities typically offers for school leaver as aspiring to be primary school teachers is usually a four year Bachelor of Education degree. We see that UTS is offering something quite different now. Can you explain what is attractive about this course and the Masters combination and why you're calling it a bachelor of education futures and not straight Bachelor of education?
Speaker 7
Unlike secondary school teachers, primary school teachers are generalist. That means they need to teach across a variety of key learning or discipline areas. Having said that, so we turn out our program enables the students to be good, solid generalist as in primary school. But there is a trend where primary school principals are looking for teachers who are not only generalists but are also specialists at the primary school level, whether it be in science and technology, in English, in creative arts, in physical education, and so on. Our programme caters to that we will produce generalists and we will also enable the students to choose a specialism and then sell themselves to school principals when they're going for jobs. But as I said before, what's also special about our new program is that we're offering this Bachelor of Education Futures. Which is an attractive qualification in its own right. One of the challenges in the teaching profession is the high turnover is that teachers often will move sideways. Now we of course are supporting efforts to improve working conditions in the teaching profession keep our teachers there, but at the same time, teachers have so many skills, knowledge that that are attractive to other fields of practise, whether it's social policy, public policy, recreational management and so on. And that's what our Bachelor of Education Futures offers.
Speaker 2
Amazing. Thank you. I'll pass it on to Nabin. With the new Bachelor of AI, will there be internship opportunities with that?
Speaker 8
Yeah, of course. Internship opportunities are always there for the students. But if we see the program itself, it doesn't have an exclusive internship embedded into the program, but we definitely encourage students to get internships. We have a team who actually looks after internship programs and we'll be able to help students, in case they are not able to secure an internship. As I mentioned, this is a very industry inspired program. We had, you know, industry experts input while we developed this program. We also focus a lot on responsible and ethical use of AI which is which is a very important aspect in this in this current world. Definitely plenty of internship opportunity opportunities are there, but in case they are not able to secure it, they are also covered because it’s a very hands-on course. They're going to learn all those, you know, cutting edge technologies such as deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning in general, plenty of areas to explore as well as, you know, they also have an opportunity to get into entrepreneurship or startups.
Speaker 2
Thank you so much. I know the field of AI has been up and coming and new and scary for some people, but hopefully we can explore these new opportunities with this degree. So I'll pass this on to Doctor Sharp. Are there any internship opportunities when it comes to the Bachelor of Public Health?
Speaker 9
Yeah. Thank you. That's a good question. So actually, it’s a professional placement is a required part of our degree and students doing the Bachelor of Public Health complete a 120 hour placement with an organisation or a business. This can be their choice as long as they can relate it to their learning outcomes and goals of the course itself, or we also offer some placements with things like the WHO collaborating Centre, which is actually part of the Faculty of Health at UTS or government local health districts, things like that. We're also looking at the opportunities for students to do placements abroad as well. We currently offer students the opportunity to do short-term placements. Last year, I took a group of students to Indonesia and we looked at the health system in Depok, which is outside Jakarta and this year we're taking a group to Malaysia. We're also taking groups to Thailand and some other countries that are yet to be announced. We're really looking at this opportunity from a global perspective as well as a local perspective.
Speaker 2
Thank you. So I'll pass it on to Doctor Seymour when it comes to the bachelor of psychology. Will students be accredited after completing their degree? And is there further study required?
Speaker 10
There is further study is required, so if you want to become a clinician, you need to do more than just the accredited sequences that we offer in the undergraduate programs that we offer, the level one and Level 2 accredited core learnings. Beyond that, you need to do a masters of clinical psychology or achieve levels 5 and 6. We're kind of offering the foundational knowledge to become a clinical psychologist. But yeah, the first we're doing the 1st 2 levels, so UTS actually also offers the Master of Clinical Psychology. I suppose those levels as well have kind of thresholds, so to be able to get into honours, you need to achieve a certain GPA of around 80 in your best 10 psychology subjects for instance, to move on to the honours. There are steps along the way in order to become a clinical psychologist
Speaker 2
Thank you. We are almost out of time. So sorry to press you guys, but I'll ask you this question. So how does the advanced science program prepare students for careers across medicine, pharmaceuticals and technology?
Speaker 11
Yep, absolutely. What all three of those majors have in common is that they prepare the students, should they wish to go on to further studies. The pre medicine prepares them if they want to move into becoming a medical doctor, the pharmaceutical sciences create a really nice pathway into the Master of Pharmacy and the quantum technology sets a student up to be at the cutting edge of research. But we're not just offering it so that we can then get them to do another degree. After completing this particular course, the students will have the necessary knowledge and skills to work across their particular industries. In the medicine one, it's in health, whether that's more the pathology side or the human health testing side. In pharmaceuticals, it could be the drug discovery working for pharmaceutical companies developing new medicines or it could be again around the testing of those medicines in a clinical perspective. The quantum technology that it's such a boom area at the moment in the areas of quantum computing, quantum science and how that knowledge is being applied to a wider range of areas. It prepares them across all of them, but also sets them up for future studies should they wish to take it.
Speaker 2
Amazing. Thank you so much for that. So I'll pass it on to Mel when it comes to the transdisciplinary school, how does the course innovation in complex systems align with the year 10 students curriculum?
Speaker 5
So currently the course content isn't fully aligned with the year 10 curriculum, but we are moving in that direction, and we just did the pilot last November. But our focus for this year is to work with the schools and align the micro with required learning outcomes and curriculum standards for future iterations.
Speaker 2
Amazing. Thank you so much. So we do have a lot of audience questions, but we will release an FAQ document detailing all the answers in that for you after this event. Thank you so much to all the panelists. Give them a hand, everyone.
Several UTS academics go through exciting course updates.
Alumni presentation
Speaker 1
Today, we're going to be joined by one of our alumni today and I would like to introduce our next speaker, Vithyaa, distinguished alumni of the Forensic Science course at UTS. She's currently serving as the general manager at Fire Forensics and in doing so for Vithyaa leads groundbreaking forensic fire investigations. She also serves as a role model for women in STEM and across various other domains, which I'm sure she'll be talking about today. So please join me in welcoming her on stage.
Speaker 2
Thank you for that introduction, Jack. Hi, everyone. Good morning, I believe I am the thing that's standing between you and the break, so I'll try and keep this moving for us all. So, I'm a fire investigator. I'm also the general manager at fire forensics. As you can see, I do a variety of things. This is just me on scene at various places, structures, trucks, mining equipment, you name it. Where a fire happens, we go. And I didn't realise I was doing I was interested in fire investigation when I left high school. In all honesty, I think I was going to become a lawyer or a doctor or something. And then I looked at how long it was going to take for me to do it. And just like, oh, my social life is a bit too important to me at that point, as it is for most of the kids at that age. When I enrolled at forensic science at UTS, I didn't really know what the disciplines were because it's so vast like in any industry. You'll notice that like there's so many different options and occupations and different career paths that you can take that might not necessarily even stem from the university degree that you do, because I'm actually a scientist by trade. So doing fire investigation is very much a very niche industry, especially as a woman. What happened is I enrolled in forensic science going “I've got no idea what I really want to do, but let's just double into it”, and that's not really an issue because, like I said, there's so many different niches within the industry. I was doing a subject called fire and explosions and we're pulling apart an IED, which is an improvised explosive device. And that's when I was like, let's see if this is a possible job and what I ended up doing was that very same day I jumped on Google, put in fire investigator jobs in NSW, private because public service is, you know, doesn't pay as well in all honesty. And so, then what happened was I then emailed to prospective employer, going “I would love to have a job, not necessarily paid, but I just want to see if I can come out with you and see if this is something I'm interested in willing to work for free, anything, I just want to get my hands into the position and see what I can do and if it's something suited for me.” It just turned out it did suit me. The next day I got an email back, I was about to go into one of my forensics labs and, what happened was my mentor and previous boss literally said to me “let's go for a coffee in Surry Hills.” Went for a coffee and I sat with him and my current boss and well, our current managing director as well. And they gave me a whole bunch of textbooks and was like, OK, can you go get steel cap boots, a hard hat, coveralls and some gloves? I was like okay, cool. And then I got a text message within two days going. “Can you come up to a job in Newcastle and the next minute I know, I’m processing fire scenes, taking photos with big camera, all in my gear. Now we're wearing masks, which you can see.
I've been in the job ever since. I got quite lucky I fell in. I would like to tell people it fell into my lap, but really it didn't. I had to take the initiative and actually email to see if this was something I was interested in. I'm so glad I did that. Because now since that's happened to me, anyone I speak to, uni student or high school students, especially family members of mine like my younger cousins. I always say to them like, if you're not sure if you're interested in something, just try it. Just email a prospective person or employer are going, “I want to see if this is something I'm interested in.” Because those employers are always looking for someone that's obviously willing to work for free, but also willing to see if someone's actually passionate enough to do that work for free, which I find really interesting. That's kind of what happened. And the most important thing I think for me now is I know I'm not just a fire investigator or a general manager. I'm actually the President and Co-founder of a women empowerment group that has branches over Sydney, Melbourne and soon to be Brisbane called Brown Boss Babes, which is all about women of colour from South Asian backgrounds here in Australia. I also own multiple businesses; one in the event space, one in E commerce, and there's a whole other new business ventures that are coming my way through my role right now at fire forensics, which is really exciting! I can't really say too much about it because I signed an NDA but asked me in a few months’ time, maybe I'll be able to tell you.
Advice for students and for yourselves to give your students. Academic hours are important. Obviously, it will teach you how to talk to people. For me, it was really important to actually be able to talk to my lecturers, to my academic staff, about something I didn't understand. If I wasn't confident to, like, put my hand up in class, I would literally just email them or go into their consultation hours and speak to them about it. And I'm sure a lot of you guys already have that happening in school with students that are interested or struggling, they're coming up to and talking to you. The next thing would be utilising the UTS Career Hub, ask them once they've enrolled in university, every university as well as UTS, have a careers hub that can actually point them in the right direction if they are actually struggling or if they go “Oh, I don't think this course is actually really for me”. They can give advice about that. You're not really stuck. There's a lot of people that I know that I'm friends with that I work with as well that have obviously transferred in between within the first or second year of uni and that's great because that learning that they've done in the first or second year of uni is quite general and broad that it can translate into what the actual course that they want to do later on is. Outside of ours, LinkedIn is the most powerful resource. I'm sure a lot of you do use this. You'll probably have a friend or a professional colleague that you've had, someone like a student that said I need to see if this is something I'm interested in or you've passed the information on going hey, talk to this person about this career and see if it's something you're interested in. I'm sure that's happened before, so LinkedIn is a huge powerful resource. Another thing is always ask the students to research. Get them to make their own steps and you can obviously point them in the right direction. But I think for me when we're looking at taking on new staff, it's all about talking and if they're knowledgeable of what the aspect of the field is already like, it's always a huge advantage.
Mentors. Mentors are amazing. I have like two or three mentors, one who's in Perth with the time difference of currently 3 hours, but I still reach out to him and obviously I've got other mentors across the world being in fire investigation. I would say reach out to mentors, get them to find mentors, whether it be yourselves as teachers, cause I have heard this in before, a lot of people always say when they're winning awards in their professional fields. They always like shout out to my high school teacher that helped me with this or, the careers advisor, so it's always really important to make sure that the students are actually reaching out to mentors because, after the school period they're by themselves. If they're still able to talk to you, if it's appropriate, or if they're able to put them in touch with someone that can actually talk to them and help them guide them and shape them, it's always a huge benefit.
You can see here student life versus employee life. They're very similar. Obviously, time is a huge thing.Time management translates to all industries. You have got a project do what are you going to do, you're going to work on it. Obviously, when you've got an assignment due, you've got to work on it outside of school, but at work you've got to work during work hours and hopefully not outside of hours. Obviously, some fields aren't always the case. There's also the social life which is really important now. Everyone's talking about burnout, and I'm sure a lot of your students have gone through burnout and the pressures of studying and getting things done on time. Make sure that they're focusing on that as well, so they're doing something that takes that time for them to understand what they need to function. It's really important when they start university, since they don't have someone like a teacher that they can talk to or see every single day. They're literally on their own. Focusing on social and time management, I think is really, really important. Friends and peers are also amazing, so a lot of students will obviously go to different universities in comparison to who they've gone to school with. They might not see those friends again, and friendships just drift apart, which is why I would always recommend they come into the O-weeks for when they start university, or they just literally come in whenever there's any Open Days and meet friends, cause a lot of the open days have students, prospective other students that are in the same wanting to get into the same field, all in the same room.
My main takeaway is to basically just say that the team that you guys are the critical part of the students' lives, but they have to have that passion. And I think if you can figure out what their passion points are and their skill sets, I'm sure that they can be guided in the right way. You heard all about the different programs and courses that UTS has on offer, so there's always something out there as well. With my background being as diverse, university is just a stepping stone. I don't see it as you're locked into that career, so that's always really important to translate into the students as well. We were doing some wildfire burns down in Bendigo just after Black Saturday is a bit of a learning exercise. So that's myself, my managing director and one of my mentors who is also an ex undercover detective with Vic Paul(?).He won't smile, it’s a whole thing, proper police work there. Like I said, just to sum up, independence, the students are only really in their control and you can only guide them as best you can. Time is also critical. Ask for help and continuously get them to grow their network. Go on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is really amazing. You can put in crew like job titles and different people's names will come up based on the city search as well and just get them to or even if you want to do it for them. Like show them how to do it. They can literally just go send them a message going:
“Hi, I'm a uni student or I'm a high school student. I'm just interested to talk to you about your career. I want to see if this is something I'm interested in.”
A lot of the time a lot of those people will reply back. It's very daunting to send those messages out, but eventually someone will reply back, which is amazing. And that's normally someone that's a potential mentor for that student. Perfect. This is literally me. I'm lucky enough to say I have a job that I love and everything I do, I do love. It's always really important to make sure that the students find what they're actually really passionate about. And I think that was all from me. If you have any questions, I'll be sticking around for a few, maybe 10-15 minutes and I've got another fire scene I've got to get to today. But it was lovely to meet you all. Good luck. And if you like I said, if you have any questions, you'll find me outside. Thank you.
Vithyaa Thavapalan, a distinguished alumna of Forensic Science at UTS is currently serving as the General Manager at Fire Forensics. She also serves as a role model for women in STEM and across various other domains
UTS College
So as a part of this admissions and pathways portion, I'd like to introduce Aline Chiron from UTS College to come on stage to talk about UTS College.
Speaker 2
Thank you. Thanks everyone for being here today. It's great to see so many people coming to UTS. I recognise some of our familiar faces, so my name is Aline and I work at UTS College as a senior partner manager. I might move quickly through the slides, but we have a booth outside with my colleague Ella, so don't hesitate to come if you have any particular questions about UTS college. You might remember that we had six diplomas that we offer at UTS, but now we've just launched actually this semester, a new diploma of Animation Leading also to the second year at UTS. The usual diplomas business, communication design and architecture, engineering and it and science plus the new Diploma of Animation that we've launched this semester. Why your students should choose UTS college so we are the only pathway provider giving direct access guaranteed entry into UTS. There are several pathways for students to go into UTS if they're really keen, but the only one that gives full credit to go to UTS is UTS College. The fastest track is to go through UTS college for your students to go in then to UTS. The reason is we design our courses with UTS, so everything that the students learned during the first year of the diploma is relevant to what students would study in the first year of the Bachelor degree at UTS. Most of our diploma programs also lead to the second year, so not all of them, but most of them will give full credit so that your students can go into the second year of the bachelor degrees at UTS. If it doesn't give the full credit, we will be able to give partial credit, so our students will be able to get some credits and waive some subjects as well when they go UTS. We offer support through the students through our learning environment, and I'll get back to that. Lots of support in terms of academic support, but also support in their personal lives. We've got the study success advisors on campus. If anything, ever happens to them and they're struggling in their personal lives, they can always go and talk to them and we'll find a solution depending on what the issue or the challenges that they are facing. We've got a student welfare team as well and lots of social networking opportunities for the students to meet with other students from the college, but also students at UTS as well. They have access to UTS, activate, they have access to all of the clubs and society they have access to the gym as well and the campus. You might remember for the ones that have been career advisors for a while that we used to be on Thomas St, we're now on campus. We are in the old lower faculty and where the old library was. So that's where the classes are now located on campus. For pathway example, so otherwise as I was saying, most of our diplomas lead straight to the second year. This is the example of the business one. I had a few questions I remember last year on how this guarantee works. For domestic students, international students is a bit different. But for domestic students, they have a certain GPA to achieve, a pass or max a credit. There is a list on the website. I'm happy to send that to you if you want so that you can speak to your students. But there is a certain GPA for them to achieve so that they have their place guaranteed at UTS. Of course with all of the support we have in place, our goal is to make sure that our students get these GPA so that they have their place guaranteed at UTS. Guarantee means that they don't need to reply, they don't need to compete with other students if they get this their spot is guaranteed at UTS in the second year in that instance for business in the second year.
Entry requirements. You might remember that we don't assess based on the ATAR. All of the students are worried usually about the ATA. We look at the HSC average instead and the way we do it is that we take the four best broad develop subjects including English and then we make the average. We've got three kind of durations 8 months, 12 months or 16 months. Majority of our domestic students will do the standard diploma unless they want to start later, let's say for instance, July, we have a mid-year intake as well. They could do eight months and then start the year after in March at UTS as well, so they could actually complete the whole degree in 2 1/2 years if they wanted to i they have the the right rate for that. For accelerating the eight months one, we look at 75% in the HSC, 67 for the Standard Diploma, which is the 12 months and we have a third entry point which is 63% in the HSC. We do have a few students as well that just missing a few points and they will be able to join the extended diploma.
Learning at UTS College, I thought it would be important for you guys to understand the way we teach. We are aligned to what UTS is doing. Our model is called learning connected and I invite you to have a look at the website. There is a whole section on this. We are aligning to what UTS does, which is called learning futures. It's a blended approach where we combine the best of the technology with face-to-face classes as well. I'll show you a schedule and what it looks like so that we prepare students to study at university and also work because things have changed since COVID and there's different kind of skill sets that students need to have once they start working, and so we are preparing students in that direction. It's very much about independent learning. The teachers are still very involved and they will guide the students again on campus also with the study success advisors. But we are teaching them those skills on how to become independent. We want to make sure that they're ready to collaborate, so they come to class already prepared. It's very similar to flip planning, if you've heard that term before, so they usually have access to the content of the class before they go in class and before they see their classmates and the teachers. It can be content to read. It can be quizzes, it can be video, anything, but they have to come prepared to class and some of the students at first might not do it, but soon, quickly enough they will realise that if they don't come prepared, they won't be able to follow the class for by themselves they realise that they have to commit and they have to do the prep work before they go to class. We've seen lots of great results since we've implemented learning connected, students GPA is actually getting greater and better and we have more students articulating to UTS. It is working. It's a better way of engaging with the students and it shows in their results.
This is what it looks like. There is a pre-tutorial first where they have to come prepare. As I said, they've got the content and everything. And then they've got tutorial A, so that's where they will be able to interact with the teachers and their students and their peers as well. It's more about discussing what they have studied before the tutorial and then again they might go back into groups or might go back by themselves to go through the content and just review what they have learned in class and reflect on that. It might be in groups as well, and then they catch up again and then tutorial B and after again the post tutorial where they can again reflect on the subjects that they have just learned. It's not. Just lecture, lecture tutorials and then another set of lectures and tutorials. We have ditched lectures. It's only tutorials now and it's very much focused on collaboration piece and wanting students to be ready to discuss what they have already learned rather than just, you know, like dry learning.
Now the fees. This is the big question that we usually have every year. It is an investment. So this year actually is $35,000 for the eight months and the 12 months program, it's the same price because the amount of subject that I should have mentioned before the eight and the 12 month program is the same amount of subjects, it's just that the eight months program is more condensed so students will study eight or nine subjects depending on the diploma that they want to do. But then the price is the same. The extended one is 44,000. The reason why you find it expensive compared to UTS and any other university? It's true it is more expensive, but we offer way more support than students would get at any other institution and also we are not for profit organisation, meaning that what we receive we invest into the campus, into our teaching methodology, into our staff, into our teachers and whatnot. And we are also not government funded. We don't receive anything from the government. The same type of course is the same price as what you would get at UTS, but UTS and public universities receive funding from the government, so that's a big difference. Also important to note that domestic students’ citizens get access to free HELP, which is very similar to HEX. So yeah, encourage your students to have a look at this option.
Thank you, my name is Aline, we have a booth just outside and don’t hesitate to contact us
UTS College is the premium pathway provider to the University of Technology Sydney. Hear from Aline about UTS College courses and how they work.
Panel session: Admissions and pathways
Speaker 1
We're going to be unpacking admissions and pathways schemes through the form of panel discussion in this next section here. Here's a summary of some of our main changes going into next year across different parts of the university. The elite athlete and performance scheme. This is essentially an expansion of the previous elite athlete program to now also support elite performers. This is not inherently sports specific, who have represented their school or state at national level competition event and had their studies impacted as a result of their training or their dedication to their craft. The idea program it's a cadetship which allows students to secure a position with one of our leading industry tech partners and that enables them to gain 3 years of paid work experience before they graduate. Students can also choose to undertake their cadet ship as a part of their bachelors of cybersecurity or the Bachelor of Computer Science. In the UTS, as Aline just said, there's a new diploma program, which is the Diploma of Animation Production.
Finally, the early entry program, Edge. In the past Edge was for engineering and IT subjects in which you had to submit a portfolio to gain extra Edge points for your early entry application. In an effort to simplify this application process and reduce confusion that has been fully integrated into the early entry program and won't be referred to as a separate program. Prospective students will still be able to preference engineering and IT courses via the University Wide Program and be considered for adjustment points for gender and subjects where eligible. Similar to the courses updates, we've got a whole host of people up on the stage here from all walks of the university and also externally so this includes Trudy Noller from UAC, Christine Afoa from the UTS Centre of Social Justice and Inclusion, Neil Randall from UTS Jumbunna, Taran Ahuja from UTS IDeA, Lucy McJannett from UTS Sport to discuss the elite athletes and performance scheme. Richard Huang from UTS admissions and as well Aline who's just spoken. We do have a couple of questions lined up for each, but please feel free to submit any questions if you have any relevant questions from members of this panel. Trudy, thank you for coming on the campus. Always really appreciate your attendance and I guess we'll kick off the panel with you. When do applications open for 2025 intake?
Speaker 2
Yes. So they'll open on the 3rd of April this year. On that day of course, we'll email students with instructions on what they have to do to actually log in and apply.
Speaker 1
Thank you very much. Christine, thank you as well for coming. Can you please tell us how inputs and SRS works?
Speaker 3
Thank you. Inputs is the educational access scheme offered to students who demonstrate difficulty or hardship throughout their educational journey, whether that is in year 11 and 12, or a vacational education or university education as. Well, the school's recommendation scheme is the way that we can help year 12 students when an ATAR is insufficient. This normally happens when a recommendation is offered from the school principal, or the careers advisor and we have dedicated teams who look into the UAC applications and that is the portal that they will use to put in the application.
Speaker 1
Thank you. Neil from Jumbunna. Thank you so much for coming today. Can you please talk to us about how the Jumbunna Pathways program works?
Speaker 4
Yeah, hello. Thank you. Jumbunna Pathway programs into UTS is an alternative entry program for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. The majority of our students who come through our program are recent high school leavers. So roughly 90% of the Indigenous cohort this year straight out of high school and with the other ten are mature age students or others. We run a unique program, I've been here for about 8 years, so it's always been in place since I've been doing the outreach work and so we’re non-ATAR based, so we don't base it on the they're a recent school level, we don't base it on their ATAR, we assess it on their years 9/10/11 and 12 high school reports, and they don't go through UAC either. They apply directly through us online.
Speaker 1
Fantastic. And for that direct application, Neil, would that be to go just to the Jumbunna website and?
Speaker 4
Yeah. Yeah, it's on our website and we promote it heavily on social media and throughout contacts in the schools.
Speaker 1
TarAn, thank you for coming. The IDeA program. Super exciting. I think a lot of schools would be really interested in this. I think a lot of students will be really interested as well when you see paid work experience, I'm sure some will certainly stand up. Can you tell me what kind of companies? When students work within the idea program.
Speaker 5
Thank you. So the Idea program idea is an acronym for the Industry Degree Academy, its essentially a career program where the students are studying a full time degree with the Faculty of Engineering and IT and also working with an industry partner for the entire duration of the degree. Right now, we have 2 courses under the Idea program. One is the Bachelor of Computing Science and the others is the Bachelor of Cybersecurity, because at the moment we're offering these two courses, the companies are more or less relevant with any company that has any kind of an IT position could basically be a partner. Over the last two years we've had 110 students who've been offered a position and at the moment we have WiseTech Global as one of the big partners and the other big partner has been the NSW Government and we have 6 departments that have our students working with them. Moving forward, we are currently in the process of signing our partners for next year, but both these departments, the Government and WiseTech Global is on board for next year as well.
Speaker 1
It's very exciting. Lucy from UTS Sport. Thank you for coming down today. May I ask who is eligible for the UTS elite athletes and performers scheme?
Speaker 6
Good afternoon. So this is dependent on the sport and all the performers disciplined. So generally, we say for the athletes, it’s competing at a state or national level, however, there's quite a few discrepancies within the sports. Very exciting this year we've included performers on this scheme and this extends from or to rather, DJ's, singers, we have a few dancers on the programme and applications for this will open on Monday the 29th of July. I think it's also very important to note here at UTS. If the student is eligible, they will receive 5 adjustment factors on top of their ATAR to any degree. Whereas other units tend to work on a sliding scale, we are very excited to be including the performers this year and any questions that you may have relevant to your students, please reach out to us. You can access our contact details on the activate UTS website, or generally you can reach out to me at uts.eap@uts.edu.au
Speaker 1
Great plug. Thank you for that information. Richard. I sit pretty close to Richard. Many of your tricky questions come from this guy. And on that topic as well. If anyone does have any follow up questions, please feel free to send them through to Slido because we will be able to address them in this panel. Richard, I have a question for you. Do all courses and faculties have the same number of early entry program offers available relative to their UAC offers.
Speaker 7
Thanks for the question, Jack. That's a good question. People always wonder whether there are more offers available either through EAP or via UAC. The answer to that is no. Every year, each faculty has a difficult time trying to determine how many we want to how many offers we want to make through early entry, and how many offers we want to make through UAC. A lot of that comes down to supply and demand for them. Their goal is to not make all the entire allocation of offers to early entry, making it more difficult for applicants to receive an offer through UAC. It is a balancing act. A lot of the time we try to make sure that applicants aren't disappointed if they don't get an early entry offer because they still have that opportunity through UAC when they're assessed on their selection rank, which is their ATAR, plus any adjustment factors. So that's something to take into consideration.
Speaker 1
Fantastic. And we've got a follow up question as well to the Slido. If a course is limited availability through early entry program as determined by the faculty or whoever it may be, how does this influence UAC offer?
Speaker 7
Sorry, could you repeat the question?
Speaker 1
Yeah. So if it courses have limited availability through early entry programme, does that mean there are more offers available through UAC?
Speaker 7
Yeah, so that's absolutely right. In that instance, the faculty is determined that, hey, look, we're expecting a lot of demand for a specific course. It might be prudent for them to say, hey, we're going to shut off early entry for certain amount of offers and then release more offers through UAC that way.
Speaker 1
Thank you. Thank you for that clarification. Got a question for UTS college. Can students use a college diploma to get a job?
Speaker 8
Sorry, say that again.
Speaker 1
Can the students use a college diploma to get a job?
Speaker 8
Well, it's a diploma, so it's a certification they can definitely put that on their resume and try to get a job based on the diploma, though we recommend students to go to UTS then, but that's possible. It's the diploma and they'll get the graduation after their diploma program is held at UTS College.
Speaker 1
Fantastic. And Aline, I have another question for you as well. What is the guaranteed entry into UTS? This is one of the main selling points of college. What does it mean?
Speaker 8
Yes. As I explained just before, it means that students, so they need to get these GPA to be able to get their guaranteed entry into the Bachelor degree at UTS. Most of the time again the 2nd year. For them it means that they don't need to apply, they don't need to compete with other students, their place is guaranteed at UTS once they have achieved this certain GPA that they need to get. Any other pathways won't be able to give this guaranteed entry. That's just UTS college given we have designed the course with UTS.
Speaker 1
Thank you. Thank you for the clarification on that. For Richard super popular guy in the slide, I guess Trudy's usually also really popular with these things too, but someone wants to know is there still 10 adjustment points for all educational access schemes applicants? For like it was in 2023.
Speaker 7
Yes, absolutely. So if you do get approved for the educational access scheme or also known as INPUTS, it's a flat 10 points and there is no sliding scale for that.
Speaker 1
Thank you. That is all the questions that we've got for our panel members. Some will be hanging around afterwards, some may not. But if you could join me in thanking everyone who's come up here today to share their wisdom and knowledge, that would be fantastic.
Our panelists discuss application and admission information, as well as the different schemes and pathways available for students.
Interactive session on AI
Speaker 1
Could someone just call out what are the biggest pain points that you? Has anyone got one? Yes. Too many kids to service. Yes, exactly right. Anyone else? Parents, parents are a big problem. Of course they are. Other problems? Pathways at universities are very complex. Yeah, administrations and we've now got our presentation working. So, a bit about me. I went to university in the 80s and this was computing for me in the 80s. I'm gonna skip this because of time, but I graduated with an IT degree and I thought I was going to be an IT guy. This is what I spent my first five years doing. I sat on people's desks, understanding what they did. It could be the guys in the factory as a forklift. It could be some other sales manager, could be the guy in finance. It didn't matter. I just sat on the desk and said, what do you do with that? And then I was able to, I guess prescribe how to automate it, right? Because I was an IT guy, but it meant that I wasn't really a programmer. I did spend a lot the time all around Asia, a couple of lessons there from me, but this is my real job. Well over 30 or 40 years, I was a connector of dots. I could connect this system with that system, and I don't know if I talked to my former self at 18, I'd say you know what you’re actually good at this. You're a good social coordinator. You love talking to people. You're not frightened of having technical hiccups on stage. You should go into sales. But I actually hate sales.
Let's look at the difference between AI and humans. What do you reckon humans are good at compared to AI? If you were, if you just score them? Empathy. Right. AI doesn’t have empathy. Yeah, cool. What else? These are the things that humans are good at. Originality. Yeah, can AI be original? What are humans bad at then? What are some things that we don't do very well because we're human? Consistency, yeah. Remembering, yeah. How many times have you been to a party, and you just forget that person's name? Some people are good at that. Actually, AI's really good at that. Yeah. Let me show you what we're really bad at. Our memory is shaky. We have self-control issues. Our computational brain is limited. We have, I mean, this is AI's being accused of being biassed. We all have cognitive bias, yeah, depending on where we're brought up. If you teach someone from Vietnam, they have different values that they have been brought up with, which influences how they think. And we have illusions, right? Anyway, what I'm going to give you like 8 things that AI can do to help you in your jobs, right. That's what this is about. I mean I looked at career guidance in the last couple of weeks preparing for this. I empathise with you guys because you've got so many different websites. That are all government based that are trying to do the same thing, right? I don't know which one is which, but what AI does a good job of it can actually synthesise information and put it in a chart. This is my attempt last week of those sites but you'll get a copy of these slides, by the way. There's also other stuff that you can look around. So what are some things that AI can do? And I want to get your help on this because. Actually, before I do, I'm going to teach you something. This is something that you're going to learn from today. How do you prompt an AI? And most students, I mean, because I grew up in the IT in the 80s. Here's ChatGPT right. There are four things that you do when you prompt an AI. The first one, and it's called the Rose model, so it spells out Rose. It's pretty easy to remember. The first one is telling the AI what your role is. I want you to be a year 10 maths teacher. That's the role. What's your objective? The objective is to teach me so that I can actually perform really well in my calculus test. That maybe calculus this year 11. Anyway, some sort of test, right. That's the objective. Style. I want you to actually give me the response as a Multi Choice questionnaire and here's an example. So that's the example of this, but I don't want this. You can give it a negative example. We call it an exemplar at university, right? So ROSE, if you prompt like that.
While they're fixing my PC, I've done it for a simpler thing, right? You got AI, what are the modes of transport between Sydney and Brisbane? I want you to act as my travel agent, the role, the objective is to give me a kind of a mixture of all the different options I can get from here to Brisbane, the style I want you to present it as a table. And I also want you to actually put the cost in a column. I want you to give me the different carriers that can take me there and I want you to comment on why they're different. That makes sense. You put that into a prompt, it will spit out a table of all the different ways you can get from Sydney to Brisbane. This is the model, right? You'll get a copy of all these slides, so you don’t have to take screenshots. Trust me, it will come out to you, but this is a good way to prompt AI. I used to cause I still, when you use Google search for those of you, you look old enough to remember. When Google came out, the first few years it was really terrible. It took a while for people to get used to it, right? But every time you put in a search string, it's a one-shot entry and you revise it. AI is different. It's a dialogue. That's why I call it seeking, not search. It's seeking. Can AI improve career advice? OK. Well, let me introduce you to Carrie. It's an agent called Carrie, the career advisor. I armed her up with all the government stuff I could find about career advice in NSW and the stuff from Australian federal government, whatever, so we can ask it, give me what question can we ask Carrie?
Speaker 1
Number one, job growth in Australia, that's a good one. Notice how I'm not spelling it right. That's OK, Carrie's good. She understands misspellings. This is why you can outsource part of your role, I guess. I'm not sure if that's true actually. Let me show you how to prompt with Rose, with the real ChatGPT. I'll put it back to even the free one. Right, your role is a careers advisor. The style is British English. I'll just do that, all right. OK, there's too much. Wait, stop. OK, please give me the top 5 growth roles in New South Wales, Australia. Be careful of these in Sydney because there's a Sydney in Canada and AI is mostly generated in America, so it thinks of that. OK, so these are probably more accurate, right? So what if you what if you were a neurodiverse and you've got some kid who's got? Oh, does anyone know what the top 10 neurodiversity's are in Australia? We know autism, right? We know ADHD. What else is there? Any others? What else. Dyslexia. Good. Anything else? OK, let me ask right. We forgot tourette's. So, let's pick one of these. Which one of these do you want to pick, and we'll ask AI to give us a career choice. Anxiety. All right, so I have a student with Anxiety disorder. That's Piglet, by the way, if you follow the Pooh bear scenario, Piglet has anxiety. What career advice would you give? It has to be stress free. That's obvious, right? There are certain companies that are more diverse in DEI, equity inclusive than others if you have one of these conditions. There are some certain things that an anxiety person could do. Let's break this down further. OK, what subjects should I study? I reckon most students don't do this. They can set themselves up for failure by not doing this. My parents, I wanted to be a hairdresser at 15. My parents told me I've got to do math, science, physics, because that's what your brothers did. I barely got over the line to get into an IT degree but it's led to a weird career because I've spent 30 years in IT and then I spent ten years in advertising and marketing because that’s my passion. Now I'm teaching anyway. Are they right? Let's go for something a bit different. Let's pick someone who's autistic and they want to find suitable careers? What do you reckon a good career for an autistic person is? And I know there's a spectrum of autism, but I'm not a psychologist. Let me change this, I'll show you the difference between GPT 3.5 and four. a career advisor in Sydney, Australia. Or I can say you are. I have an autism student. What advice do you have and how does this fit with growth industries. OK, so this is talking to me, the career advisor. Let me show you how it can change roles. I didn't give it a specific objective. Because that's how autism works sometimes, right? They just want specific tasks. You can say that to an AI. And it will give it to you list by list and autism people will love this, I think. Would that be right? They love a list of tasks, or maybe not.
You're all in that most of you are in this organisation, I think. Is that right? OK, so they've got a YouTube channel. If you're a student and I don't know your YouTube channel's, probably pretty boring, but let's just find one that's got a bit of length this one's 27 minutes. You can now with AI tools, you can summarise that video, probably not very relevant for a CSA video, but it could be relevant if you're studying calculus in math. It gives you the key insights. You can also get the transcript, I mean YouTube is going to do this automatically soon and this will help with learning, right. Kids will be able to, they're already consuming YouTube and videos. I've even tested this actually against rubrics that we have at UTS, I took Elon Musk's speech for his launch of the battery pack, and I applied it against the UTS rubric to see how good a speech it was. And it came back here with an answer which then I asked, well, how would you improve it? It gave me some ideas and said it'll rewrite it for me. Boom, it did it. Speaking of speeches, let me just go to this tool. This tool is called Yoodli. It helps students practice their talking by recording your camera. It's going to you're going to get my camera on. Here we go. I'm going to start recording now. Let's say if I do some uhms, I'm a bit shy of talking, right? OK, let's say that was my speech. It said I crushed it, but no, it should provide commentary on how many “uhms” I did, how many? This is the stuff that humans can't do. We can know that I “uhmed” and “ahed”. But if you're autistic, you can't say I did it 8 times. Let me just go to an example from my library. I was coaching some 3-minute thesis students and how to actually better present cause I've been advertising, and I uploaded this students finalist presentation. This is usually a summation of it. It put the whole transcript together. You can see on the right it's giving examples of how to actually improve. It points out if they've used the wrong word for inclusiveness, that's going to be a massive problem going forward because there's so many other diversities that we need to be aware of. So that's one thing that Yoodli really can do. Microsoft's got something. It's not quite as good as you do yet, but it's built into PowerPoint. But again, it's a way of outsourcing the role of the career advisor to tools so you can service more. I think that was one of your pain points. We're done, Carrie. What about work experience? OK. For the top 10 neurodiverse conditions in New South Wales Australia, what jobs should they do and subjects? This is using the Rose model output as a table. I'll skip the example in the interest of time. Theres some obvious jobs that you probably get from your latest journal, but you could go deeper. So we're talking about what about the sensory processing disorder. There will be an illness that a condition that's diagnosed next year that you have never heard of, this is one way to actually find out about it. It doesn't mean you have to go back to uni, but there are ways, right? And it gives you the strategies and how to approach most of them. You already know you know how to empathise, you know how to understand students, you know how to actually give them space. It's going to be one of the tough challenges that we have. I think the accord has some good stuff for it, but we'll see if it gets implemented.
This chart here looks like an ECG of when you go to hospital and you measure measuring hearts. The sound's not working here, but I will share the link with you. It looks like this you watched this video, right? And you can't hear the sound, so it's not going to work, but it's a girl, it's 45 seconds. See how it's got my camera in the sort of spotlight over the side. It's measuring my emotions. It's looking at my facial expressions to measure my emotions as I see this and what happens in the video. I'll give you the spoiler. It looks like a horror movie, and then it's a surprise happy birthday, right? You're supposed to go anxious and then, ah, I'm happy. But you can see my emotions come in there. That's how it works, and that's what that slide is. Well. It just shows you how it's not just how there are technologies that you can use to monitor. Some people need monitoring. When I presented it to the brush farm prison guards, they were like, give me that. I said, oh, there's ethical issues. There's no ethical issues, they’re in prison. We can monitor whatever we want. They were talking about how we could go back in time to see when a major incident was and identify the perpetrators and see how their problem is. Some prisoners don't have a facial expression when they, but do you know what I mean? Technology is going to keep improving, hopefully for us for what's coming in the future. The future is going to be where a teacher talks to a class and above their head will be this student stuck on this screen. That's who I need to go and see. This student's got a question. This student is bored. Yeah. Wouldn't that be useful to the teacher just by wearing glasses like this? They don't have to wear these goggles. I think it's going to help with equality in some shape or form. What are the key takeaways? These are the skills that students need. It's not about STEM or humanities I don't think, it's about these skills. I have students in postgrad who don't know they have problems with ambiguity and I'm going, man, this is this is what you need for the future. You've got to be able to deal with change rapidly. You know, I go into FASS, the Faculty of Social Sciences at UTS. And I say, you have no reason not to be a data scientist because it's not about technology anymore, it's about asking the right questions. That's even more important. Good researchers know how to ask the question. How do I? How are we going for time? Should I finish? If you've got a student who wants to talk and talk and talk all the time, or a daughter like that or a son, let's not be sexist. Pi is a new tool. Well, not new, but you can talk to it, right? So let me try this. Hey, Pi, it's Ian here. I just want you to tell me what are some good career advisors?
Speaker 2 (AI)
Sure, Ian. Let's give it a shot. What would you like to try? I'm here to help you.
Speaker 1
OK, so I've got our neurodiverse student who's got dyslexia in New South Wales, Australia. What career path should they do, and what subjects should they be considering?
Speaker 2 (AI)
For a neurodiverse student with dyslexia in New South Wales, Australia, I would recommend considering careers that leverage their strengths, such as creativity, problem solving, and visual spatial skills. Some potential career paths include graphic design, entrepreneurship, or engineering. In terms of subjects, they should focus on classes that emphasise these skills, such as art, design, business or STEM subjects like physics and computer science.
Speaker 1
I'll stop there, but you get the idea, right? It actually changes the interface when you talk to it. For many students, you might say, oh, this is just because there is a text thread. They'll just give me the text thread. But just by talking it out for some students, it will make a difference. The future is automated, agents. That's one tool. I gave this tool a problem. I said, look, I want you to solve the problem of poverty in India. That's a pretty cool question, right? It identified 6 steps to do that. It took 45 seconds to do that, which I was left hanging with the students. There are ways to where AI is going to change things, I suppose. It doesn't have to be instant, is my point. You can put in a request to the AI in the future and say, hey, I've got this new kid that's just arrived at my school with this. Can you go and research that and come back with a nice, formatted report that I can give to the parent right. AI will do that. So. How do you how do you treat AI? We talk about cultural humility, that is, respect for other people's culture. There are people who are very negative against AI and technology. I would say just treat it like a culture. It might be something you don't understand, so give it respect. But get AI literate for yourselves, for your job, and for your students. I think if you see what's happening in America right now, they're about to vote in Trump for a second term, right? That's because their populations lost the ability to critical think. Yeah. And it starts in school with this. I'm. I'm sorry I couldn't get through my present. I'll give you the deck. There are some other things that you can click on and play with, but if you've got questions afterwards, I'm hanging around. But that's it for me.
Ian Farmer is a casual academic for Engineering and IT and Business. Ian takes you into the world of AI in education through an interactive activity.
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