Image: Noogz [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Covid-19 accelerates university’s plans to ‘reduce complexity’ and make courses more ‘distinctively Tasmanian’
The coronavirus pandemic and an “overreliance on China” have forced the University of Tasmania to cut more than 380 courses as part of a major overhaul of its academic direction.
“We need a course structure which has our students at its centre, is distinctive, easy to navigate and is kinder to the people who administer and deliver it,” vice-chancellor Rufus Black said in a letter sent to staff on 10 March.
The changes will mean job losses for the university—which has campuses in Hobart and Launceston—but as yet there is no estimate of the number of staff who will be affected. The university’s main research strengths are climate science, Antarctic oceanography and dementia research.
Black said the impact of the global Covid-19 pandemic on the university was “still not certain” but would create long-term challenges.
“We have a long way to go in dealing with this issue and its consequences will last well beyond this year,” he said.
“Thanks to the good work of our teams responding to the issue, the majority of our students in China and subject to travel restrictions have started to study with us. But as we know, the spread of the illness continues to shift.”
Black said UTAS faced “sustained headwinds” that would affect its long-term sustainability and needed to offer courses that were “more distinctively Tasmanian”. The redesign will aim to attract more students from interstate and “create a more diverse cohort of international students”.
“To do that we have to remove much of the complexity which has built up over time,” he said.
“We have assembled 514 degrees which map to 2,657 units delivered across 72 study periods according to 3,855 study plan rules. Compounding this complexity is the fact that we have to keep making exceptions to try to get it to work. Last year alone we made 8,422 overrides just to our prerequisite, antirequisite and corequisite rules.”
Black confirmed in the letter that jobs were likely to go “as complexity was removed”, and he said the university would offer support to those affected by the restructure.
“As we have discussed previously, we know this will mean we need less people. We will lean hard on natural turnover to achieve as much of that as possible.”