Di’s Coffee Corner – Quarter 4 2024

by: Dianne Van Eck

Hello again friends and colleagues,

My July Kimberly holiday is well and truly over and it’s time to plan for the End of Year break. I think many of you will be looking forward to at least a week off from the hectic pace of what was 2024. I certainly am! The Federal Government’s complete lack of appropriate management of the international student caps has caused significant hardship and stress across most institutions. We are helping our clients to find ways to reduce costs, increase efficiency, consider other options and manage their projects effectively during these difficult times. Many staff are leaving the sector and taking a break. Others are moving to other institutions. In my 28 years working in the sector, I’ve not seen it quite this tumultuous before. I wish you all well and hope that the brief break provides some well-earned rest and recuperation and time with family and friends.

Course Advising

Earlier this year, DVE worked on a project with SCU to support their implementation of a new approach to course (academic) advising. There are several good case studies available in the literature, and these informed our work. DVE prepared the 3-week training plan and conducted several initial training sessions for the 14 new course advisors, many of whom had not worked in the sector before.

This work at SCU has been an outstanding success with recent data indicating a 7% reduction in attrition. We held a webinar with guest presenter and Project Lead, Dr Pete Muir, Manager of First Year Success taking participants through the SCU journey. It’s a great success story and I recommend the webinar to you to hear the actions Pete and the team took to create this excellent outcome.

Placements in higher education

Our placement/WIL work in the sector continues. We continue to work on projects to improve the placement/WIL experience for students. I will continue to organise the Communities of Practice for WIL/Placements in early 2025 after holding the first Education Placements COP this year. DVE has been developing a new placement management system for Rural Health Departments. This is being developed to expand across other disciplines beyond health. It brings together many peripheral elements of placement management, including travel, accommodation, events, communications, surveys and finances. If you are interested in further information, please let me know or click on the link above to book a demo.

Conferences

As you may have heard the ATEM 2024 conference was a great success. Well done to ML and the organising committee for the hard work making this conference a showcase of activities, achievements and improvements across the sector. Unfortunately I was unable to attend this year but many people told me it was an excellent conference. ATEM 2025 will be held on 7 – 10 September in Canberra with ANU as the ATEM Conference partner.

Planning for 2025 conferences continues with the Universities Australia ‘Solutions Summit’ confirmed for 25-26 February 2025. A reminder that Early Bird tickets are available until 16 December so book now. I will be attending with my colleague, Carly Boon, and we look forward to meeting many of you there.

The 2025 Heads of Student Administration (HOSA) conference will be held in Christchurch, NZ from 3 – 5 September. I attended the 2008 ATEM Conference in Christchurch. In February 2011 the city was devastated by a huge earthquake, killing 185 people and injuring several thousand, as well as destroying much of its infrastructure (100,000 buildings were damaged, with 10,000 needing to be destroyed). Our hearts went out to our colleagues at that time. The city has since been rebuilt and it will be interesting to visit it once again.

Three of my DVE colleagues attended the recent TEQSA conference in Melbourne and their report, prepared by new DVE Senior Consultant, Michelle Mosiere can be found here.

Campus Visits

I spent 3 days at the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane in September and thoroughly enjoyed travelling to campus again. It was great to run some Business Process Improvement training sessions at the University of the Sunshine Coast and catch up with colleagues. I also met with colleagues from UQ to discuss their work in the sector.

Emma Laurence and I have been working on a project at UniSA and we visited the Magill and City West campuses. The City West campus brought back some wonderful memories of when we both worked on that campus from 1997 to 2004. I then moved to the Magill campus and Emma commenced working at the University of Newcastle. Emma has been with DVE for almost 4 years now and we work on many projects together. It was great fun reminiscing of our time at UniSA and how much we learnt under the leadership of then VC, Prof Denise Bradley, AC.

Here we both are outside the Yungondi Building. Ironically, taking a selfie proved difficult and a former DVE colleague, now studying at UniSA, came out and offered to take our photo. Thank you Neemaa Gopal!

Tommy is learning so much!

I have been enjoying quite a lot of ‘Oma’ time with Tommy. It’s wonderful to see how his speech and learning develops as he explores new things and tries different activities to test his capabilities – always asking me to watch. I’m not going to stop him from doing these things (like jumping from the top of his small slide to the ground) but my heart is often in my mouth as I hope he lands on his feet. He often takes a tumble but that’s ok because he is learning what he can and cannot do, and then he keeps trying and he masters the activity. He is always running around, unless he’s sorting his cars and trucks.

He has learnt counting from one to ten, knows many colours, and loves to dance to any music. The latest is the theme from Rawhide from the movie The Blues Brothers, which starts with ‘Rolling, Rolling, Rolling’ to which Tommy is rolling across the floor, laughing and singing to the music.