Adelaide's Offshore Higher Education Experiment Continues

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University College London (UCL) may be closing down its Adelaide campus, but two other universities remain in the same building in Adelaide: Torrens University Australia and Carnegie Mellon University Australia.

Torrens may well prove to be the success story of the three in Adelaide, as it uses a different business model to a typical Australian university. Torrens is part of Laureate International Universities, which provides education on-line to 800,000 students.

Torrens presents a challenge to Australian universities as it can teach students using its world wide on-line resources. This could serve as a useful wake-up call for Australian institutions to learn to compete, before offshore educational institutions take away their market. At the moment I am a student of a North American on-line master of education, to learn how to design such on-line programs for Australia.

How Many Universities in Torrens Building Adelaide?

Torrens Building Adelaide, 
Photo by Bahudhara, 
CC BY-SA 3.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

Recently I had a request from UCL Australia for a reference from one of my former students, who was applying to do a  PhD. I had never heard of "UCL Australia", and in checking I found it is the Australia arm of University College London (a highly respected institution). However, the Australian operation is based in the Torrens Building, 220 Victoria Square, Adelaide. UCL have a photo of this building with their flag out the front,  but I was sure the building was associated with another university.

A web search found the Carnegie Mellon University Australia is also located in the Torrens Building, as is Torrens University Australia. All three of these institutions feature photos of the Torrens Building on their websites. Both UCL and CMU have photos of the building, each with only their own flag out the front. CMU Australia also show photos of teaching facilities and a video.

It is not clear if each institution has its own teaching facilities in the building, or are sharing them. Having shared facilities would be good for the students, but would be a little misleading if each institution to fails to mention that and so implies they have the building to themselves.

Of course, universities are not the only ones which recycle buildings in this way. The Australian government has an impressive looking military command centre, which appears in the media with different names and functions attached to it.