The world is changing and the way in which people work together is changing, so university
education needs to change as well.
We’ve therefore reimagined what a university education entails: the way students learn,
the way we teach.
We’re hoping to provide students with a broader range of skills to take advantage
of what we see as a world full of possibilities.
We know that there are some elements of the education we’re never going to change: we’re
never going away from rigour, we’re never going away from depth of disciplinary knowledge and command.
But we do need to be mindful that students are going to face an increasingly uncertain
future; they are going to need greater agility, they’re going to need greater digital literacy,
they’re going to need greater resilience than ever before.
In essence, this curriculum is about preparing those students for that.
There will be four keys parts to the new Sydney Undergraduate Experience.
The first is academic rigour, where students will develop excellence in their primary field of study.
The second part is a global perspective, where students will gain cultural competence and
have an international experience.
The third is cross-disciplinary learning, where students will have an opportunity to
take units and subjects from other fields of study, and where we’ll bring students
together from different disciplines to work on problems together.
The fourth part are real-world projects, where we’ll give students authentic experience
in addressing community, industry, entrepreneurship or research challenges.
When you lead in a complex world, the problems that you’re going to be asked to deal with
are very rarely going to be resolved through one disciplinary lens.
That’s why the curriculum is so built on this construct of interdisciplinarity and
allowing our students – and indeed more than allowing, promoting – the idea that
the students traverse a greater breadth of content, so that in their futures, they can
successfully deal with the very complex challenges that are going to arise.
We’ve designed this curriculum after carefully considering a lot of sources of information.
We’ve reviewed the research literature, we’ve consulted broadly with our staff,
we’ve listed to student feedback, we’ve consulted with employers, and we’ve tracked
both graduate outcomes and labour market trends.
We’re convinced that this constellation of components is what will prepare students
best for the coming world.
Our benchmarks here are not local, they’re international, because our graduates are going
to spend their careers in an international dimension, in an international labour market.
So we’ve talked to an enormous number of people, not just here in Australia, but throughout
the world, and we’ve taken the benefit of that wisdom and brought it together to design
something that really is very revolutionary for us and very exciting.
We’ll continue to have single, double and combined degrees across professional, specialist
and generalist degrees, that is, the broad degrees in arts, commerce and science, and
these will offer an unparalleled choice of study areas.
We’re introducing a new shared pool of majors across the University, which will allow students
to tailor their degree to their own interests.
The really exciting thing about the Dalyell Scholars program is that it draws together
a joined-up experience for all of the scholars who enter the program across the institution as a whole.
We’ve always had programs for talented students and advanced students, the difference here
is a greater sense of unity, a greater sense of cohort, and a greater sense of opportunity
that we build in systemically for the cohort as a whole.
We’re introducing a new degree – the Bachelor of Advanced Studies – which will allow students
to supercharge their three-year degree by taking the two degrees in combination.
This will allow students to obtain the experience of all four of the components we’ve described
to a very deep level.
Students will have additional learning opportunities in our new Open Learning Environment.
There they’ll be able to access short courses on topics as diverse as design thinking, cultural
studies, foundational concepts from other disciplines, and entrepreneurial thinking.
In the new curriculum, we’re adding things that we’ve never offered before in terms
of that breadth of opportunity for students to traverse the curriculum, find new combinations
of knowledge that they haven’t been able to access before, and really just take these
incredible learning journeys.