IDEATE Summit 2025

Greetings from the inaugural IDEATE Summit at the Australian National University. The Vice Chancellor opened proceedings with a St Crispin's Day type speech. She talked passionately about the difficulties of opening university up to a more diverse range of students and staff. As a first in family university student from a low SES background, with limited literacy, I have a direct interest in this as well as having studied the topic as an educator (ironically I typed "optic" rather than topic, before the spell checker intervened). 

The Summit is intended to be an annual event for leaders from in computer science and engineering teaching to work on more inclusion and more ralivant skills for graduates:

"understanding the current state of diversity in university technology courses;

sharing lessons learned and putting success stories into context for initiatives across universities; and

collaborating on ways to overcome barriers to inclusive learning, or to recruiting greater diversity among students and staff." From: IDEATE Summit, 2025

My approach to inclusion at university is to provide online and blended options. As well as making access easier, the limitation of online learning design requires a more structured, more explicit approach which I found helped me as a student. Also I would like to see more students start in the Vocational Education Training (VET) sector, before transitioning to university. We also need to explicitly teach and test soft skills: how to give a presentation, organise a team ... 

ps: One of the presenters said they had to "reset the North Star" of their organisation. I had to look this up, as I am from the southern hemisphere.