Changes

{{#widget:YouTube|id=PKCKcI0qSYk}}<br />

<br />

<br />

=2020 Under Graduate FEIT UIF=

==Strategy 1 - Increasing I&E Engagement through Awareness and Accessibility==

<span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-size:small;">Resulting from the Landscape Canvas, we learnt that there was an incredible amount of I&E resources available throughout UTS, however these were either not well known by students, or lacked an online presence and therefore were currently struggling with the pandemic forcing students online. Following on from this in our student interviews, we learnt that there was a threat of exclusivity amongst some I&E programs, including UTS Startups and the iHub. Many students were unaware of how to access the spaces and programs, and felt they were designed for specific students.</span></span>

<span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-size:small;">We also learnt the importance of introducing I&E from day one. This strategy focuses on involving students with I&E from orientation so that they may carry these skills and resources with them through their entire degree.</span></span>

Our first milestone focuses on introducing the concepts behind I&E at both Orientation and within the classroom for first semester classes. We aim to run workshops during orientation through the iHub to teach design thinking, and again during the first week of semester when subjects generally don't have a tutorial. The main subjects we are focusing on are Engineering Communication and Communication for IT Professionals, as a large amount of FEIT students take these classes.

Our second milestone focuses on how we can retain these students once we have introduced them to I&E. By improving the virtual space for the iHub, we hope to attract students back to the space through showcases, what's on information and a booking system. As well as this, we hope to introduce our workshops to clubs and societies in order to bring them into the iHub space.

Our third milestone introduces a lead in program for our successful, exisiting I&E programs such as UTS Startups and Techcelerator. This program targets students who have a light bulb moment and want to explore the idea more, before progressing to the programs aforementioned. The program would help them learn and explore I&E skills, provide networking opportunities with peers and faculty, give them access to resources to turn ideas into something tangible and provide a platform to receive feedback.

Our student feedback demonstrated to us that there are high barriers surrounding programs such as UTS Startups and Techcelerator. Our fourth milestone aims to bring down these barriers and increase accessibility into these incredible I&E programs that already exist. By introducing a reverse pitch night, we hope to prove to students these programs are worthwhile. The typical means to join these programs currently is to prove the worth of your idea and then be accepted. By reversing this, we hope the leaders of these programs will demonstrate the value and entice them to explore further.

In order to maximize the reach with current UTS students, we need to engage with them using the channels they use the most. This includes UTS Online for Undergraduate students, Canva for Postgraduate students, Email, Facebook Groups, and inclusions in Lectures. Students will be able to click on mindmap through these communication methods and it will take them to the UTS website so they can zoom in and explore all the resources.

Edit and finalise the interactive mindmap by collaborating with I&E stakeholders to ensure all information is correct and up to date. This will also include discussions and collaboration with UTS Web Developers to understand how to integrate the mindmap onto the UTS website.

Launch the webpage with the mindmap onto the UTS website and link the webpage on UTS Online to initially target Undergraduate students. The criteria for success are defined as an increase in student engagement with I&E resources. This criteria is data-driven as we are able to collect quantitative information on the interaction of students on the webpage.

After successfully launching the webpage and utilising UTS Online, we will expand the reach of the resource by displaying it on Canva for Postgraduate students, through email newsletters such as Careers, including the resource in orientation lectures and Facebook Groups.

The webpage will need to be updated on a regular basis to include relevant information and resources for students. Running a stakeholder workshop focused on how to edit and make changes to the mindmap and webpage is essential for the long-term sustainability of the resource. This will ensure that students will have up to date information as stakeholders will take responsibility to upload their events, opportunities, and resources.

=<span style="font-size: xx-large;">2017 Spring UIF's&nbsp;</span>=

Recently, UTS has begun encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship around campus, made evident by starting two team in the University Innovation Fellows program. Created by the previous and new candidate UIF’s at UTS, this strategy aims to provide a place to facilitate innovation collaboration and teamwork for students. Currently this strategy is already off the ground and we have already pitched our ideas to the heads of the Engineering and IT faculty and they are more than enthusiastic with our idea.

What got our project started was when the heads of the Engineering and IT Faculty emailed us expressing interest in re-purposing a previously unused space in the Engineering and IT building.

Two weeks from our initial stakeholder meeting, we re-scheduled a meeting with the faculty leaders to pitch our ideas. We generated three ideas for our innovation space which had varying levels of creativity and many different features. We gained valuable insigth from the faculty leaders, as they provided many thoughts and opinions on what they thought would work and what was too far out there to be practicle.

To provide funding for the room, the faculty leaders had a potential investor lined up who was interested to know what kind of opportunities this space could provide for students. We had a short meeting with the investor where we gave him a summarised version of our three pitches and explained why this un used space should be re purposed. Over all the investor had a positive opinion of our ideas and even had his ideas and suggestions to improve our ideas.

In this milestone we aim to discuss potential strategies to take our ideas to the final stages and eventually turn the innovation space from an idea into a reality.

In this milestone we aim to create a design for the final product by working architects and designers. We aim to have a professional looking design that will be enticing to students as well as serve their practical needs for innovation and collaboration.

For the construction of our space we aim for it to take as little time as possible, to minimise disturbance for the students, with the construction taking place outside of peak university times.

In this milestone we intend to open our innovation space to the students. It is very rare to see new and interesting spaces open from existing spaces inside UTS, so we aim to have an awesome opening ceremony.

<span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">During interviews with first year students at UTS we discovered that a lot of students were extremely unengaged with extra-curricular acitivites, were intidimated to be involved, were not aware of opportunities or were wanting to be involved but didn't have the belief they were capable enough. Many students would go to class and go back home or to work.</span><br /><br />As well as this, a lot of students also felt that they were unable to differentiate themselves when applyng for a job and felt that the only way to do so was through extra-currcular activiites, however, communicating their involvements was extremely difficult when integrating it in their CV.&nbsp;

'''The Plan:'''

We would begin speaking to employer's about what they seek when hiring people. We would conduct an empathy interview about students and the hiring process, and how extra-currcular activities could be implement when going through the job application process.

We would speak to the Faculty of Engineering and IT about the demands of industry when it comes to job application, and provide them a list of reccomendations that industry expect from universities in regards to student exmployment.&nbsp;

We would then get students to voice their concerns to Faculty about the needs of formal recognition in the Academic Transcript and then being to work closely with Faculty to being integrating this system.&nbsp;

After this, a checklist would be created to ensure that extra-curricular activities are monitored and thoroughly examined to give students opportunities to have these involvements formalised in their transcript.&nbsp;

Implement a IT system to ensure the smooth running of the documentation and recording of student involvement at UTS.

Announce the creation of the new section of the Academic Transcript.

When interviewing students from various degree backgrounds, it was often evident that rarely interacted with students who were apart of a different faculty to themselves. In many occasions, they barely interacted with people outside of their own course. We have often seen that students who know more people in a cross disciplined environment often get involved with a much grander range of activities and therefore enjoy their university experience more.

A continual aim of the UIFs at UTS has been to foster innovation and promote student engagement at our uni. We are modifying it slightly so that it is no so much as a strategy and instead making it more of a goal we will achieve by doing other activities. In this case we are getting there by bringing together students from a range of backgrounds and using their different skills so that they work on the theme that we have for that particular workshop.

We have found during our empathy work that students are most likely not to go to an event because they do not know any other people who will be going. A good way to overcome this first hurdle is with social activites as these are often vary popular and can be used to familiarise people with the cohort they could be working with for a rnage of other events.

This then means that we will be able to have a much larger audience to promote our events to, along with the change that people will be interacting with students not apart of their usual friend group.

This tactic follows on from tactic #2 as students who have become familar with us as a staple of uni life. This tactic will begin to integrate the uni courses with the social side of the university. The innovation methods that we have discussed with the group can be integrated with real life problems cementing the knowledge they learn at uni as an actual useful thing to have. It will also expose students to the grander scheme of what their knowledge can be used for.

Due to the make up of the university a reasonable goal of faculty mix would be around 35%, this would allow for the slightly larger faculties in the universities, while still making sure that we have an almost equal mix of backgrounds across the university.

Currently all UIF program at UTS is hosted from the engineering faculty. This has been fantastic at the start, but it would be a true step forward to expand this to other faculties around the university as to gain different perspectivies and new ideas.

One of the most influential times at university is in the first week of the first year of a student's university life. Here many friends are made and perspectives are grown. At the moment most, if not all introduction sessions are run on a faculty level with many being dealt with in cohort and major groups. By growing this so that the activities include a range of different backgrouds the university would be in a much better position to host cross disciplines events and grow strengths as the encouragement to take classes out of a specific faculty would come from the students.

The final milestone after the range of improvements would be for the uni to introduce subjects that were not directly related to any specific faculty and instead were based around the aim of solving real life problems. Here students would come from a range of backgrounds and would be able solve issues in a challenge based learning environment. This would fit in well with the graduate attributes that UTS promotes and also would prepare students for real life work.

Instead of perpetuating an environment in which students are forced to seek out I&E programs and events themselves, we believe the solution to this problem is to bring small I&E experiences into the everyday life of the UTS student. We are still investigating how best to do this with ongoing ideation, prototyping, and feedback.

In order to increase studnet awareness of the current I&E offerings around UTS. We want to expand the advertising efforts of these programs so that they aren't aimed solely at those who are already involved in I&E. Currently, the majority of I&E advertising can be found around our innovation building and is much more scarce around the rest of the campus.

By integrating I&E activities into events like Open Day, we can create a culture of innovation amongst the future students of UTS. If we keep on track, by the time they get here there will be incresed opportunity and awareness to satisfy the needs of this culture.

We aim to form teams of I&E ambassadors from across the university campus. These ambassadors would help us to disseminate information regarding I&E events and offerings while also educating students in I&E tools and techniques. As these teams grow and develop, we hope to create new I&E offerings with their help.

Once a culture has been developed across the university, our goal is to create physical innovation islands in thoroughfares across the university. These islands would have information on I&E offerings, examples of past student creations, and student I&E ambassadors to teach new skills and answer questions.

As an extension to the innovation islands, we hope to create dedicated innovation spaces in each building at UTS. These spaces would originally be used for extra curricular activities and events relating to I&E however we hope that over time they could be used for subjects in which a component of I&E can be taught.