Community and Access

• About the Portfolio
• Pro Vice-Chancellor
• CDU in the Community
• Campuses and Centres
• Community Engagement
• Remotelink
• Schoolslink
• Staff Contacts
• C&A Champions
• Organisational Structure (.pdf)
• Operational Priorities Plan 2007-2008
• Operational Priorities Plan 2009-2010
• UHI-MI Scotland / JVSs Ohio USA

 

Community and Access
Alice Springs Campus
Grivillea Drive
Alice Springs NT 0870
Phone: + 61 8 8959 5201
Fax: + 61 8 8959 5305

Executive Summaries

University of Highlands and Islands - Millennium Institute, Scotland

The University of the Highlands and Islands - Millennium Institute is offering Higher Education (HE) courses to about 5,200 (about 3,700 full time equivalents) students spread over the most rural and remote areas of Scotland. While the UHI-MI is looking to become a university in its own right in 2007, it uses partnerships with three existing Scottish universities and a relentless focus on meeting external Quality Assurance requirements to ensure both credibility and acceptance in the community. The operational and regulatory environment in which the UHI-MI operates is remarkably similar to the Nothern Territory context with two notable exceptions - no Higher Education Contributions for HE students in Scotland and a recently amalgamated Further Education (FE) and Higher Education Funding Council which will oversee the allocation of public funds to both the FE and HE sectors.

There are a number of learnings from the UHI-MI experience that can be usefully applied to Charles Darwin University (CDU). Likewise, there are several potential opportunities for CDU, particularly in the areas of staff training and development.

The visits to five different UHI-MI sites and discussions held with over 20 staff, observations and brief interactions with students and participation in their major organisation-wide public function, the Annual Lecture, was characterised by a remarkably consistent message coming from right across the organisation. UHI-MI is seen as a vital public organisation that is crucial to the economic development, population stabilisation and growth and the promotion of the unique social and cultural aspects of the region. The consistency of message and vision that is shared by the entire UHI community was outstanding.

While it is also clear that there are tensions evident at a number of levels (eg regions versus centre, FE versus HE) these are being actively managed. The notion of Community Engagement (CE) is so heavily intertwined in every activity of UHI-MI that most people were curious as to why I would ask a question about how they measure CE. One further clear environmental difference is that there is an unwavering belief in and commitment to increasing the levels of qualifications and experiences of the entire population that is viewed as an absolutely necessary investment for a prosperous future as opposed the current Australian view that education and training is a service cost to be contained.

UHI-MI has come into existence to provide HE to a region that has had minimal to nil services in the past and lacks the critical mass of students to be likely to have a more traditional university operating in the region in the foreseeable future. It is developing by using a highly networked, real organisation built upon the physical presence and infrastructure of existing (and still operational) FE colleges. Quite clearly, the use of over 100 Learning Centres that are well connected with internet and video-conferencing facilities are crucial to the delivery of the HE programs to remote areas.

It stands out that the conceptualisation of how the student interacts with the provider is one that presumes the remotely-based student is actually best supported for study in a warm home and family environment and that by joining UHI-MI you become very well connected to multiple networks of groups and receive high levels of personal and academic support. These networks include the student being linked to their lecturers, other students in the same course, other HE students in the local area and a local person capable of giving personal (and, sometimes, generic academic) support. This stands in somewhat stark contrast to the Australian approach that pictures isolation and distance as a problem to be solved and the student as a receptacle at the end of the food chain.

Likewise, the use of Subject Networks to have multiple linkages for staff seems to be a key factor in developing a corporate presence that compliments a very purposeful management decision to disperse as many functions as possible across the geographical spread of UHI-MI.