How the pandemic pushed UQ Business School to the edge

How the pandemic pushed UQ Business School to the edge

The pandemic may have driven widespread digital change but its digital transformation has been temporary, a University of Queensland Business School (UQBS) academic has argued in recounting the challenges the school faced adapting to border closures that trapped 75 per cent of its students overseas.


The national border closures were initially expected to be short-lived – but as the academic year began and weeks dragged into months, years, UQBS was forced to completely reinvent its computing architecture.


“Everyone went home in early 2020 and said they would be back for the first week of uni,” Dr Micheal Axelsen, senior lecturer for business information systems within UQBS, told the recent ISACA Oceania 2022 conference.

“Because we’re very good analytical people and we can work out how things can go really badly, we planned for the worst-case scenario – and that did happen, with 75 percent of our students overseas.”


“We had to rearrange everything.”


UQBS went into reactive mode, acting quickly to figure out how they could continue to keep 2000 students and 170 staff connected well enough to continue delivering the school’s 200 different courses.


The complexities of group assignments meant they went “out the window”, he said, while moving invigilated exams online “was a real struggle”.


Unlike many corporates, UQBS couldn’t rely on VPNs to help its students and staff securely access resources and collaborate, given that they are illegal in China – where the majority of the school’s international students originate.


The inevitable combination of Zoom lectures, organisational compromise and learning flexibility helped the school drag its students through degrees but “it has been a real struggle to keep them engaged”, Axelsen said, noting that “it has just changed the way they work and the way that they think about learning and engaging.” ..

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