Future Readiness with Zoran Sugarevski, Victoria University

At the end of 2020, we were beginning to have open discussions with customers about the decisions made throughout the course of the year.

Organisations had to make quickfire decisions that would set the tone for how the business would cope during the progress of a global pandemic. Some went into overdrive pivoting their operations, whereas some others really leant into the challenge and reacted quickly to mould an approach that would empower staff and end users. The latter have become best case examples of organisations that responded well.

I spent some time with Zoran Sugarevski, Executive Director of Information Technology Services, Victoria University, to discuss the approach his team took to support the 40,000 enrolled students plus staff that had to shift to a pure remote format overnight.

What was going on in the education sector when COVID-19 hit?

In January, the business model of many Australian universities was suddenly placed under immense pressure as travel restrictions stopped the return of thousands of international students. More than 40 per cent of the higher education sector’s annual revenue comes from international students, which meant the travel restrictions had a huge impact on universities, including us. The whole sector had to quickly adapt to support international students online before the start of the first semester.

We saw students, new and returning, who had left the country over the end-of-year break and then couldn’t return. This put all universities in a position to have up to $4.8 billion at risk, and that's just for this year. Universities Australia has modelled it out, by 2023 the impact to the university sector could be anywhere up to $16 billion. It was a time of immense pressure for our industry as all sights were set on collectively supporting students who were both in-country and abroad, to ensure they could resume their studies.

These are some incredibly significant financial losses, how did VU respond?

We fortunately already had a strong focus on online education, offering a number of our courses online, but needed to accelerate the roll out of our digital capabilities to take all courses to students online, and simultaneously provide access to staff to continue to work effectively from home. This is where VMware came in. We were already a customer of VMware’s and were exploring the possibilities of taking our remote capabilities further. When the pandemic hit, we turned to your team to accelerate the delivery and together - in just a few weeks - they implemented a secure virtual desktop solution, using VMware Horizon.

So, you already had remote learning capabilities in play, it was a matter of upscaling. What underpinned this?

We have a five-year transformational plan in play and we’ll be entering the fourth year in 2021. The driver of this has been the focus on offering a specific learning approach for our students, called ‘the block model’. This is something very different to what other universities in Australia are doing as we mapped it to other learning facilities in the US and Canada. As it was somewhat new, we turned to both contemporary and emerging technologies to really create a very different and personalised student experience. Put simply, the block model sees students complete four subjects a semester, one subject at a time over 16 weeks. And we’re seeing the benefits for our cohorts. The results of our students have significantly improved in the pass rates right through to the high distinctions and distinctions that they receive.

Seems an innovative approach flowed through the DNA of the university?

Our approach has always been focused on the student experience first. Amongst the senior leadership team, we have always sought to understand what technology is out there and what resources we can use to improve the learning outcomes for students. This appetite and commitment has seen us make significant investments in technology over the years. The clincher for this year, was speeding up the process and leaning on vendor experts to ensure we had the right tools in place to be able to act rapidly and in line with our overall vision.

What has the process been like, making these decisions at the executive level and rolling them out to staff and students?

The benefit of the technology we have rolled out e.g., a custom mobile app and online engagement platform, have really been designed to benefit the student. By taking this approach, it becomes almost too simple, too compelling not to utilise the resources provided. For example, 95% of our workforce uses the technology at hand extensively. We can’t ignore the fact that the pandemic played a core role in this. We completely upscaled our offering and staff embraced technology to support the learning needs of students.

That being said, I would never have expected this level of uptake across our cohort, a year ago. I would have never imagined that our workforce would connect to a VMware solution with virtualized applications, let alone implementing a VPN system within days of transitioning to delivering online learning to all of our students. And the ability staff have to move quickly and access the literature and leverage services, has been phenomenal.

So, where to from here?

Adoption of technology has been rapid across our workforce, and the barriers to adoption have disappeared. This puts us in an even stronger position to enhance our five-year transformational agenda, learning from this year and considering what else we can achieve over the next two years.

Reflecting upon the wider education industry, there are big opportunities for the sector and for the university itself to further accelerate investments into emerging technologies such as robotics, automation, AI, the internet of things. We need to acknowledge that we are living in a new world that is evolving rapidly month on month. The real opportunities will be realised when we see these technologies complement one another and be put to use. As we enter the new academic year next year, we need to start thinking about staff and student appetite to adopt a sometimes-on-campus, sometimes-at-home model and we need to gauge sentiment closely. The real task ahead of us will be to remain vigilant whilst exploring the next wave of technology that will help us support our people. 

Based on your experiences from this year and making observations of the broader market, what do you believe sets a leader apart?

I think it has a lot to do with continuously wanting to push the boundaries of what is possible and partnering with the executive leadership, academics and researchers to align on where the organisation is, where it needs to be and what it needs to do to achieve its long-term goals. For us, it’s keeping the end user’s experience at the core. I think this is the opportunity for a lot of organisations, and in particular Victoria University to leverage existing partnerships to effectively fulfil plans. So now is the right time to further invest into those solutions, and I think the end-user adoption rate is only going to increase from here.

A big thank you to Zoran for joining me as we reflected on the past and looked to the future. If you’re interested to hear more about his story, you can hear more from Zoran in our Enterprising Minds podcast, hosted by former AFR BOSS editor, Narelle Hooper.