August 1, 2007

Celebrating success and embracing change

Recently, we held a BBQ in Building 23 for staff to celebrate the good outcomes for the Faculty in terms of both VET and Higher Education resulting from Semester 1. The attached photos show some of our Casuarina and Palmerston campus staff enjoying themselves last Friday evening.

With encouragement from their Heads of School and theme leaders, EHS administrative and academic staff all helped to ensure that all possible final results were in on time for release to students before the start of second teaching semester.  A number of people around the university had commented to me about our strong performance in both getting Semester 1 results in on time, as well as having LearnLine and Print materials for distance students also being available on time for Semester 2.  EHS also had a markedly improved performance in getting their Course Accreditation /Reaccreditation documents through the system this year and in a timely manner. There are a few minor things that the DVC still needs theme leaders to attend to with these documents, but these are mostly relatively minor. It is important though from an audit perspective that these required changes can be shown to have been completed.

The mooted changes to the way we manage our VET business at CDU was presented by VET Director Aaron Devine at meetings with staff last week. It seemed to me that Aaron’s ideas for having a more thematic team operational focus for VET delivery was well received by staff, and he will conduct further small group workshops to allow staff to feedback commentary on the proposed model.  I encourage staff to participate in these workshops so that we can achieve the best possible outcomes for VET teaching at CDU. In my role as Dean, I have been encouraging staff to also consider the importance of maintaining a shared academic ethos in both VET and Higher Education where discipline groups clearly overlap and share teaching spaces and facilities.

Semester 2 higher education study is now well underway. Students can still enrol in units up to the end of week two of semester, so lecturers please assist these students to get a flying start into their studies by emphasising due dates of the first assessment items.  Further good news was received at the Nutcracker meeting last week, that for the first time, CDU will either meet or even possibly exceed its DEST funded student target load.  The Corporate Communications group headed by Anthony Smith ran a very targeted student recruitment campaign for semester 2, with the aim being to recruit an additional 300 EFTSL new student enrolments mid year. There was strong student interest in nursing and teacher education. It is likely though that we will need to cap nursing student enrolments at current levels, since we are unable to guarantee further clinical placement positions for these students. Another excellent outcome for the Faculty this week was the advice that our Pharmacy program had passed the first stage of the external accreditation process, so that graduates can be professionally registered. Congratulations to Associate Professor Roger Rumble and his team on this important achievement.

At the recent Katherine and Darwin agricultural shows, our VET students in primary industries from Katherine did a very nice job of displaying their Brahman cattle, and came away with numerous prizes. I went out to the Darwin showgrounds to see them in action last Friday in the judging ring, and I was very impressed with the professionalism of the students both in terms of how they were turned out, and how they handled these large animals with ease. Congratulations to Brian Heim and the staff from Katherine campus for these great outcomes.  I noticed that the ring announcer on several occasions paid tribute to the university and to the students and staff for their efforts to helping make the show a success. As I said in my last Dean’s desk column, this all assists future student recruiting to CDU.