MBA (Leadership) Overview

[Kate]

My name is Kate Ames and I'm the Director of Learning, Design and Innovation at CQUniversity. I came on board with the MBA Leadership because I have a background, a really long background, in teaching in by distance, you know and, I started teaching by distance in the mid 90s actually. So one of my interests was in the different ways that students are learning and I was really particularly interested in this concept of self-paced approach and those students who you know could possibly work a little bit more independently than we were expecting other you know students normally when we design a course.

So for example there's this notion that students have to learn better by groups but in our instance the question was well actually maybe the groups that they're working with in their workplace are as good as perhaps the groups that you might encounter in a normal classroom. So just really unpacking some of the different ways that we could approach education really intrigued me so I, I, came on board. I'm also particularly interested in the concept of equity for education and the idea that you know everybody deserves the best possible education regardless of where they live and you know the idea that you might be a student in you know Tennant Creek or in Longreach or Alice Springs or wherever and you just really want to be better at your own backyard, not necessarily you know change the world, although you may also want to change the world but at the moment the way that MBAs in particular are structured it's very very difficult to get a really good MBA experience without having to go and do intensive workshops or travel to a metropolitan region.

So one of the questions that we asked ourselves was well how can we possibly provide that experience for students and cater for a different range of experience and so then thinking also helped you know inform our course design my experience.

With the MBA is also informed by my experience as a Military Officer, I'm a part-time Australian Army Aeservist and have been since 1997 and I've been a Military Public Affairs Officer since 2001. I've deployed internationally I was involved as the advisor to the National Coordinator of the Australian Defence Force operation bushfires assist, so I've had significant experience, I suppose, over a long period of time in providing strategic communication advice, you know, at a range of levels you know in fairly high pressure contexts.

So every day that I've been an academic for the last 20 years I've also been really a public relations practitioner working at a strategic level so, you know, I bring a lot of that to the course and I'm particularly interested in that leadership component you know and, you know I've been involved in training in leadership within the army, I'm also in a training role and I'm currently a Lieutenant Colonel I'm heading up a public affairs joint training capability so I'm really interested in seeing how people grow personally and learn from their experiences and are able to inform their views and their practice through both learning and experience and bringing those two together, and you'll see many many opportunities within our degree to do authentic reflection, reflective practice linking theory to practice and that's some of the thinking behind how we designed the program.

So I'm really excited about the MBA Leadership here at CQUniversity, we've seen significant growth, and most of that growth has been through word of mouth actually as students really come to appreciate the flexibility associated with being able to really genuinely pace themselves online. They can cope with a life crisis and just drop the program and then come back and intensely study as they need without the administration need of extension requests and dropping out and and all of that sort of stuff and also the fact that it is it is a lower cost because we've thought about the design of the program and we've you know stripped away some of the things that are quite expensive for students and staff and really focused on the main thing, which is being able to provide a forum for students to connect with one another and for staff to communicate and create a personalised feedback model. So, I'm a marker in the MBA Leadership I really look forward to seeing you as you progress I'm sure I'll encounter you on your journey.