The rest of Australian public universities will need to catch up with Central Queensland University in three key areas, according to Gavin Moodie, the higher education policy analyst at Griffith University and regular contributor to The Australian’s Higher Education section.

“People [at other universities] are imitating you while telling you what you’re doing isn’t proper or traditional – it just seems to me an extraordinary position,” said Moodie during a presentation made to CQU about the changing higher education environment.

“You’re experts,” Moodie explained, “let us remind the rest of the sector what you are on about.” .

The way government allocates funding and administers loans to students will transform higher education and will change the way institutions operate and relate to their students, according to Moodie. He believes there is a scope for further disaggregation within the sector, an approach that CQU pioneered in Australian higher education.

“One way of understanding the innovation that CQU has introduced to Australian education is to show it has maintained the integration of academic activities but dissagregrated other and support activities – a major innovation in my view and one that is not very well understood in the rest of the sector. It would do the sector well to understand that,” he said during a Learning & Teaching Seminar (Tuesday 05 June) entitled New institutional roles for a new environment.

CQU has been distinctive in applying the disaggregation of various parts of the learning-teaching process to face to face learning-teaching, according to Moodie.

Central Queensland University is also leading Australian universities in another key area, what Moodie called the domestic-international nexus.

“The story that you tell the rest of the sector is that international students are no longer a fringe activity, no longer an add-on,” said Moodie.

The inter-relation and the inter-dependence of domestic and international activities in higher education, according to Moodie, is not only reflected in CQU’s administrative procedures but in the University’s three-semester year which “leads the nation” by organising and conducting learning and teaching based on the study patterns of its students.

The third key area is international links and partnerships. While many universities have delivery and academic arrangements with institutions overseas, Moodie highlighted CQU’s partnerships in Australia as another leading innovation.

“Other universities partner with private providers but they are not as integrated as CQU. They follow CQU. You were the first and that is something worth celebrating,” he said.

“Public universities still have reservations about imparting financial consideration in core decision making... Money, they feel, is grubby,” he added.

Gavin Moodie’s presentation, which also covers curriculum for international students, education standards, domestic demand, competition and a call for “national priority” campuses in rural areas is now available for streaming at http://streaming.cqu.edu.au/staff/vc_staff_forum.htm