Welcome to the 2021 Teaching Year - Professor Phil Levy
A very warm welcome to the 2021 teaching year and the first issue of our monthly Learning and Teaching News, from Student Learning teams in the Division of Academic and Student Engagement. I hope you were able to connect with friends and family over the summer break, and took advantage of the time to switch off and recharge.
Next week we welcome a new cohort of nearly 8,900 commencing students. Many of you will be participating in O’Week activities across campus and online. Thank you for your commitment to this exciting and important week for students, and please do look out for the activities the Teaching Excellence team is running to promote our community’s values of academic integrity, through a fun and interactive ‘IntegriTEA’ campaign. You can read more about the campaign below, as well as about our new MyUni academic integrity modules and other academic integrity resources.
Professor Phil Levy, Pro Vice-Chancellor Student Learning
2020 has been tipped as a ‘no going back’ catalyst for transformative change across Higher Education globally, accelerating the development of new, flexible models of blended and fully online teaching. And, so far, 2021 looks more like the second half of 2020 than a return to 2019.
We are very much looking forward to welcoming our offshore international students back to Adelaide when that becomes possible. In the meantime, however, next week, around 900 commencing international students will be embarking on their studies remotely because of the continuing travel restrictions and 2,033 continuing international students also are studying from remote locations. And we have 165 students starting online postgraduate programs run through the UoA/Pearson Alliance in just the first Online Teaching Period of the year, with many more expected to join us over the months to come.
It’s exciting to see the University continue to adapt our educational delivery and practices in the changing environment, and we have a great opportunity to seize, to build on the momentum of change and innovation that was triggered last year. I am confident that the creativity, resilience and dedication demonstrated by our educators and professional staff in 2020 will continue as we strive to deliver the very best education and support to our students in 2021.
Finally, can I take this opportunity to thank everyone who has worked so hard to make our inaugural co-curricular International Summer School such a success. One of the learning activities was a Summer Business Consultancy, for which nearly 200 students undertook projects with a range of local SMEs, start-ups and community organisations. A special thank you to our volunteer mentors who supported the student groups so ably to achieve excellent project outcomes and to develop much-prized employability skills along the way.
Professor Phil Levy
Pro Vice-Chancellor (Student Learning)
Please note: student figures are rapidly changing. These figures were correct at the time of publishing.