One example I find really fascinating has fallen out of the United Negro College Fund, whose primary purpose is to fund scholarships for black students, with 37 different universities that make up this particular group. Along with industry, including Deloitte and various foundations, they’ve pulled together a digital platform, offering online learning for their students.
 
They’re not trying to recreate they're trying to reimagine what education could be. And the platform will enable them to provide access where they have not been able to provide access before, and students can remain in their communities and continue to contribute to their communities.
 
The lessons we can learn from something like that is when partnering, you can be more sustainable and more viable. And it’s purpose driven, underwritten by a sense of equity.

Students are probably not aware until they start to apply and dip into these things to understand what's ahead of them.
 
One of my favourite institutions in the US is Western Governors University, which is a competency based higher education institution that delivers everything online. And they have extraordinary outcomes.
 
There are other smaller providers that we see that are emerging, which have been long established like the Northwest Lineman College, which trains nearly 8,000 lineworkers a year. They work directly with industry employers, and they supply to market.
 
The conversation we will need to continue to have is whether or not our sector is ready for the innovation that's required, to have a range of these models and to feel comfortable that they can form part of a learning teaching, training, education, and research landscape, and not feel that they have to constantly justify an existence when they're providing value.
 
One of the other stakeholders is industry. And, if we're talking about legitimacy, industry can provide that. Northwest Lineman College is a simple example of where industry is working directly into the marketplace and is creating training opportunities to train their own.
 
We may see these kinds of developments more and more in Australia and the question we might ask ourselves, are we ready to embrace that within our current ecosystem?
 
If you would like to learn more, visit our AFR Higher Education Summit 2022 page.