UniSA to turn Magill campus into aged-care home for specialised training, expand West End CBD campus, close East End campus
UNISA will turn its Magill campus into an aged-care home for specialist training and expand its campus in the CBD’s West End under a new $500m plan.
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THE Magill campus of UniSA would become an aged-care home where students gain specialised training as part of a $500 million, multi-campus redevelopment.
The university would continue expanding in the West End of the CBD, while the City East campus would close, under a new strategic plan to 2025.
The plan envisages an extra 8000 students for a total of 40,000, a quarter of whom would study wholly online.
New options for international students would allow them to study at UniSA online from their home countries.
The proportion of domestic students receiving scholarships or other financial assistance would rise from 8 to 20 per cent through the UniSA Foundation.
Vice-Chancellor David Lloyd said Magill would become “a tertiary aged-care facility (for) training, innovating and transforming practice”, in a partnership with an aged-care provider. Nursing, gerontology, physiotherapy and psychology students would be able to specialise in aged care within their degrees, in recognition of the importance of the growing industry.
“We want to get the maximum benefit, academically and commercially from any treatment of that site,” Prof Lloyd said.
To make way for the aged-care home, Magill-based education students would move to Mawson Lakes, while the schools of Creative Industries and Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy would move to City West.
A modern extension of the Lion Arts Centre would be the uni’s new creative industries hub.
Prof Lloyd said the goal was to co-locate connected disciplines, allowing for a curriculum overhaul giving students more opportunities to study across disciplines. The plan says this will deliver “skilled and flexible graduates to an ever-changing workforce”.
Despite a significant expansion of the City West campus around Hindley St, no new lecture theatres would be built while others would be “repurposed”, as the uni accelerates its “flipped learning” model of delivering lecture content online to free up class time for discussion and deeper exploration of topics.
“We’ll maximise our multifunctional tutorial space … as we migrate to that model of instruction,” Prof Lloyd said.
He said the uni had “land aplenty all around Hindley St” for expansion, including the bus depot and former Barbecue Inn sites.
However, he said “the most exciting part of E25 (the Enterprise25 plan) is not the physical campus” but the commitment to improving the quality of “industry-relevant research and employment-enhancing teaching”.
Goals include having its top 20 courses ranked in the top 100 of their kind internationally; for 60 per cent of research activity to be directly linked to industry partners; and for UniSA to be among the top eight in Australia on research excellence ratings.
The plan says UniSA will establish a “transition-to-university team focused on first-year success and retention”.
Prof Lloyd said the team would better link current retention supports such as pastoral care and the “learning analytics” that flag students who may need support.
The “significant” rise in total financial assistance for students meant each recipient would get a “meaningful” amount — not just a redistribution of the same money over a larger number of students, Prof Lloyd said.
The strategic plan has been approved by the UniSA Council and will underpin its direction if a merger with Adelaide University does not proceed.
If a business case for the aged care home stacks up, construction could start as soon as 2020. The move out of City East could happen several years later, Prof Lloyd said.
Under the former Labor state government, Magill was earmarked for an R-12 school where UniSA student teachers would train, but the plan fell through.
