Co-authored by Gabriela Quintana Vigiola and Lucy Blakemore.
The UTS Master of Urban Planning is a hands-on, practice-orientated course, guiding students to become effective and successful in the Planning profession. During the course of their studies, students build knowledge and skills to enable them to influence decision-making and ultimately to shape the future of the cities we live in.
Gabriela Quintana Vigiola, Course Director for Urban Design and Planning programs at UTS, shares insights into how industry supports and engages in feedback processes with students, and how these approaches are adapting as the profession and the world of work evolves.
Practice-orientated feedback for a field in continuous change
As the environments in which we live and work change, so too does the practice of Urban Planning. To create industry-ready graduates in such a fluid discipline, we need to connect them to what’s happening now, in real-world projects and events.
Learning must be practical and applicable, from the case studies we work on to the way we teach and assess throughout. Industry engagement and feedback is fundamental to enable a meaningful and practice-orientated learning process.
All Planning subjects at UTS are closely connected with industry, bringing in guest speakers, for example, to share on areas of expertise, current projects and the details of their everyday work. This complements the concepts and theory in the courses, and student feedback tells us they find this input very useful, applying the learning when they move into their own professional practice.
Discovering opportunities in new spaces
As with many other courses, the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic forced the Planning program to reinvent how to engage with industry so we could continue supporting the same high-quality learning experience for our students. Industry presentations, lectures and Q&A sessions all had to move online, which also meant additional support for some industry partners who were less comfortable or experienced in these online spaces.
Moving online, however, also created new opportunities to engage with this industry expertise. Pre-recorded lectures were supplemented with live Q&A sessions to provide formative feedback on student queries, and deepen skills through the process. For self-paced courses, this expert knowledge could also be translated into shorter pieces of industry-focussed text, audio and video content, too.
Industry guests were also invited to online sessions as panel members for students’ presentations, which students deliver prior to a related assignment. Students benefit from an experienced, ‘real-world’ industry audience and authentic feedback that they can then incorporate into their follow-up assignments.
Plan, learn, iterate, and plan again
We observed and learned a lot as we moved through these changes, noting that students appreciated the flexibility in being able to access industry expertise through pre-recorded content, and that their interaction with practitioners helped them to apply the concepts and skills learnt into professional reports (assignments).
We also noted that some industry experts were more available and open to participating in live sessions with students as they were able to join remotely from wherever they worked. Recorded feedback from industry practitioners also allowed students to re-watch and better implement suggestions into their assignments.
Going forward, we are more conscious than ever of the value of the relationships we have developed with industry partners, and will continue to evaluate and adapt to different ways of engaging industry, students and staff to maintain close links with our profession.