Merlin Crossley has conjured winds of change at UNSW. The DVC Academic has briefed staff on a programme to centralise student support services this year. It’s part of the university 2025 strategy and is intended to be in place by the end of the year, ready for the reconfigured teaching calendar in 2019 (three ten week terms plus an optional five-week summer session).

The changes include implementing a new customer relations management system and updating curriculum management. There will also be staffing changes. Learned, but nervous readers, suggest to CMM that timing makes this very ambitious indeed.

Professor Crossley confirms that there is a plan to ‘unify’ student services and have many new systems in place for next year.  “At UNSW we have a lot of dual (combined) degree students so ‘unification’ and generally trying to improve services and consistency of services for our students makes sense. The Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching, and other feedback from students, also tells us we should address this as soon as possible.”

He adds that “we have actually been working on this for a while,” but agrees “we do have a lot of work to do.”