What my Intel Pentium Pro didn’t teach me at university: The changing face of the Australian tertiary experience As I write the introduction to this article, I am reminded of my days as an Kelly Alford undergraduate tertiary student, poring Director – Durack College over my hand-written lecture notes, leafing through the tagged pages of my textbooks, and skimming through the highlighted sections of my blurred photocopied ‘Readings’. My bedroom floor would be scattered with the open pages of resources as I tapped out my assignments on an early model ‘Intel Pentium Pro’. As archaic as this all sounds, and even though my computer from 1997 would not have the capacity to store a single high-res photo, it got me through my degree just fine, and my university experience was rich and full. And I dare propose that despite the incredible technologies available today, tertiary students are facing a vastly different and arguably poorer university experience. I remember my uni days with fondness, and while I managed to get through the degree and secure a teaching position the semester before I graduated, these are not what I recall as being the most noteworthy experiences of my time at university. I think of my degree and graduate job offer as the by-product of a four-year period spent wide-eyed and bushy-tailed in a new town, making new friends, and having the time of my life. At a recent gathering to celebrate a dear uni friend’s ‘milestone’ birthday, a bunch of us who went to uni together took much delight in reminiscing our uni days. I can assure you, there was not a single mention of an academic topic. We recollected our first meetings with each other at the tutorial sign-up board and how we knew we’d be lifelong friends as we had the same motivation – how could we squash our classes to four days so we could get to the beach on the fifth? We shared secrets of how we avoided paying for on-campus parking so we could pay our rent instead, and we debated the real reasons we joined the plethora of clubs and societies along the way. We laughed until we hurt about the quirky characters we sat alongside in classes and wondered what ever happened to them. We were nostalgic about a time that afforded a slower pace to life and how we took pleasure in the simple act of filling the two-hourlong breaks between classes by lying on the lawn, soaking in the sun as we caught up on readings and tutorial tasks. Being on that lawn meant you would often find yourself dragged into a game of touch footy to even up the numbers or clock a Frisbee to the head if you weren’t careful. These were great icebreakers and opportunities to meet students from other faculties who became flatmates, who became ball partners, who became business partners ... We lost count of the people we knew who met their spouse during their uni days and recalled the classmates with whom we have crossed paths since graduation, both personally and professionally.
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I came away from that party feeling grateful for the experience I was gifted and genuinely sad for the tertiary students of the post-pandemic era. I thought about my postgraduate degree and how it was purely online, and despite the couple of hundred people in my cohort and the variety of lecturers, I have not once seen or heard from any of them since. I wonder if this
is the experience that today’s school leavers are entering. I think how much of a shock to the system it would be, coming from high school with a strong community, surrounded by familiar faces and routines, only to find uni a time to sit at your desk at home and stare awkwardly at a screen for four years. That’s a pretty dire prospect and perhaps an exaggeration, but the point I’m making is that, according to the most recent figures, over 60 per cent of school leavers (under age 20) will enter tertiary study (Universities Australia 2020, p. 3) and therefore are set to spend a significant portion of their formative years as a ‘university student’. What I am most concerned about for this generation of students is their lack of opportunity to really engage with the university experience. I remember my experience as a tertiary student as one where I was known, seen, and heard. I had genuine rapport with my lecturers, and I felt a connection to my campus. I was not on the Student Council, but I knew who was. I didn’t write for the campus newspaper, but I read it each week. I didn’t feel like a cog in a wheel of an export industry supporting the national economy. Rather, I felt like I was a part of an educational and social resource and appreciated for my contribution. Doidge and Doyle’s (2002, p. 7-9) reports suggest that the educational mission of Australian universities was in transition well before COVID-19. Government and some businesses promoted reform in modes of delivery, such as microcredentialling and blended learning (bringing together digital learning and faceto-face teaching). Now, universities are faced with the question of which elements of online learning should be preserved and how to more effectively use technology to promote learning. For some university staff and administrators, who have struggled since the pandemic to balance health and safety with educational and financial concerns, higher education without a campus can be a seductive option. But as they consider the potential for virtual learning to reduce the cost of higher education, they should also be curious about what benefits students derive from being physically present in the same room or on the same campus. If online education continues to be widely employed, that should be because it enhances learning, not because it is less expensive. Clearly, some classes work better online than others, and some lecturers have a special talent for teaching virtually. But the higher satisfaction of students who attend even a single in-person class every week points to a profound difference between how students feel about in-person and online classes. Moreover, even if online teaching ends up being effective, its adoption may still hamper efforts to form a cohesive campus community. In Wright’s (2021, p. 17) survey results, students who had more frequent in-person classes were also more likely to feel that they ‘belonged’ at their university. What evidence do we have of the value of in-person learning: the return on investments in bricks and mortar? Herein lies the problem. There is little to no research on the benefits of in-person learning versus remote learning due to the infancy of the practice. The space is still so young, and again, I would
