By Professor Paul Burnett, CSU Pro Vice-Chancellor for Researchand Graduate Training

My task this afternoon is to provide an overview of the utilisation of these two buildings. Both are used for a variety of purposes, many of which are administrative in nature. However, the two critical functions of these premises are to house a Learning Media Laboratory to support staff involved in online education and secondly to support research and graduate training at CSU. The unifying theme, which integrates the functions of these buildings, revolves around providing high quality educational services to rural and regional students.

This University unashamedly claims to be the leader in online higher education in Australia for the following reasons:

• it has taken a whole-of-University approach to online developments several years before other universities and Product Companies,
• it provides online services through ALL its subjects to its 25,000 distance education and 8,000 internal students,
• it integrates its Learning and Teaching online environment with its administrative environment,
• it invests heavily in online innovation in the provision of library services,
• and it undertakes focussed research into the effective use of online technology for Learning and Teaching.

The Learning Media Laboratory in the South Building is one of several sites across this multi-campus university where teams of academic staff, web designers and educational designers work on e-environment and online projects to enhance the quality of Learning and Teaching, especially for our rural and regional Distance Education students.

The building we are in now houses the Centre for Research and Graduate Training which assists and supports the research endeavours of academic staff and higher degree students. The Centre has three aims: to enhance the University's Research culture and profile, to facilitate a positive learning experience for research students resulting in successful completions and to oversee consultancies, outside professional work and intellectual property issues.

I should note that the opportunity for Charles Sturt University to provide positive learning experiences for research students has been significantly reduced due to the decrease in funded higher degree research places from 66 EFTSU in 2000 to 18 in 2001. This represents a 73% decline.

Some 220 of our 465 research students are undertaking their research degrees in Australia by distance education and we require these students to visit and meet periodically with their supervisors. In this building we provide office space and computer facilities for them when they visit us. We also run a series of workshops and seminars for research students and their supervisors and these facilities are utilised for those activities.

Many of our research students are conducting research into rural and regional issues and are linked to one of our 6 major research centres. As a recently appointed Pro Vice-Chancellor I have visited some of these research facilities and was struck by the amount of internationally competitive research that is conducted by students and staff around rural and regional issues.

All our centres have projects servicing the local community by investigating specific questions about important rural and regional issues. For example, the Centre for Cultural Research into Risk is conducting a rural youth at risk project in conjunction with the Bathurst City Council, the Centre for Rural Social Research is researching the improvement of water management through the social analysis of water users, the Johnstone Centre for Research in Natural Resources and Society has a grant to develop indicators for a river's health to be used by local management agencies while the Farrer Centre is investigating herbicide resistance, an agricultural and environmental issue of international importance.

In summary, both of these buildings play a key role in this University's commitment to providing high quality educational experiences to students studying in regional Australia and to supporting our higher degree research students and academic staff who are investigating significant regional and rural issues.