Our 2019 Areas of Focus

VISUAL: Professor Paul Gough, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Vice President, College of Design and Social Context is in Courtroom 2 in Building 1 at RMIT’s City campus and standing in front of five panels, one for each of RMIT’s five areas of focus for 2019.

PAUL GOUGH SPEAKS: Hello there, I'm in courtroom 2 in building 1 and this is where, for the last seven weeks, 60, 70 senior staff  - academics, Deans, our professional staff, directors of resources and planning - have been working to plan 2019.

VISUAL: Panning shot of the five panels. Paul Gough walks along the panels and talks to various pieces of information pinned to them.

PAUL GOUGH SPEAKS: And these five boards here represent the Areas of Focus for 2019, and there are five big areas of focus. There's one here which is about students’ experience … a big one about the staff, the people. Another one around the service culture and how we make the organisation tick.

This one's about industry, and how we make sure that WIL and all the activity with industry will work. There’s one about our global footprint, and how we expand into the Asia region and make that really happen. So each of these will inform the College plan, they'll inform the school plan and that will work its way right into individual work plans.

I'm not going to go into that much detail because there's a lot of work behind this which we can set out in this same communication. But, just to give you an example, on the student-facing one you can see that we will build on what we've done in 2018.

This isn't about starting again. This is about building on what we've done. We’ll improve on program delivery. We will support staff to improve on program delivery and a big project around that is how do we build the architecture and the scaffolding around each program.

And then the next section really is ‘what does success look like?’ How will we measure that success? And there's some very, very simple KPIs - key performance indicators - in here. So for instance, we will now aim in 2019 to deliver improvements in microsurgery to 2000 courses, we will look to create 46,000 people accessing, students accessing, our micro-credentials. Canvas will have six new elements - and that's a real enhancement on what we have at the moment.

So this sets out what we're going to try and do, and how success will be measured. And each of these five boards has something in it around what is our signature initiative, what is it that makes RMIT exactly RMIT, what is its premium.

And I think what we're trying to do across all of this and into 2019, as we've been doing in 2018, is achieve lasting cultural change; a fundamental shift in how RMIT faces into the world, that our students are ready for life and work, that we are linked to industry and that our research has

maximal impact.

So this is a template for the future. It informs the College plan, which is contained in this message. It's really important stuff and I need you to be on that journey with us.

VISUAL: Animated RMIT logo ends the video.