Knowledge

1. Support staff and students to co-produce relevant, responsive and inclusive curricula that offer a diverse range of learning opportunities and that are agile, responsive to current issues/emerging challenges and designed to meet the needs, interests, learning styles, aspirations and backgrounds of our student community.
2. Offer students the opportunity to develop their Essex education, harnessing the power of our intellectual assets, discipline mix and interdisciplinary strengths, and adopting a rounded approach that prepares our students to be innovative, entrepreneurial change-makers.
3. Encourage and enable our students to collaborate with communities and social enterprises to develop projects or ventures that create social benefit.
4. Realise the opportunities to meet the needs and aspirations of students and graduates through innovative approaches to learning, including where appropriate blended learning, flexible and accelerated degrees, and flexible opportunities for students and graduates to accumulate credit.
5. Draw on and extend our distinctive discipline mix and capabilities and our unique research assets to define research challenges, set agendas, lead the advancement of knowledge and respond to enduring and emerging challenges.
6. Collaborate with partners who share our values and commitment to improving people’s lives to develop innovative programmes of study and research and to promote intellectual exchange, inter-disciplinarity and openness, guided by principles of open science, transparency and intellectual honesty.
7. Work in partnership with Knowledge Gateway tenants to drive innovation and enterprise in our region, to showcase the University’s research strengths and contributions as a national leader in innovation and the application of knowledge to business and enterprise (including social enterprise), and to scale the range of opportunities for students and staff across our range of disciplines to contribute to and benefit from the success of the Knowledge Gateway.
8. Continue to develop the networks, strategic partnerships and communication channels that connect our research and education base with our user communities, including industry, enterprise, government, policy, public sector and third sector users, to maximise the effectiveness and impact of our research and education in improving people’s lives.
9. Develop professional services that are creative, scalable, streamlined and efficient, and optimised to provide education and research services to a community of about 20,000 students and 1,000 researchers in 2025.
10. Review, refine, develop and create seamless systems and processes to support, inform and prompt decision making, monitor their impact, effectiveness and efficiency and listen and respond to feedback from partners and users.

2.1.1 Our research-led curricula will induct our students into our communities of academic and professional practice through disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge, ideas, practices and techniques.

2.1.2 We will work in partnership with our students to ensure that our curricula meet their needs and aspirations, to create opportunities for students to develop their Essex education and to ensure that every student is supported to acquire the skills and capabilities to put ideas into action, to benefit people and communities. Every programme will offer students opportunities to work across disciplinary and skill boundaries, to shape their learning and to develop the skills and practices that support social action.

2.1.3 We will continue to nurture our global mind-set, collaborating with international partners to develop innovative programmes of study, learning from international innovations and experiences and providing opportunities for our students and staff to benefit from our global outlook.

2.2.1 Our Essex Spirit compels us to ask challenging questions, applying disciplinary and interdisciplinary ideas and knowledge and negotiating the spaces between boundaries to pursue creative and radical innovation and address emerging challenges.

2.2.2 Our research will meet the challenges of our time, addressing problems of global importance to shape and influence disciplinary and interdisciplinary thinking. We will draw on and extend our distinctive discipline mix to maximise the transformational potential of our research capabilities. We will champion collaboration, within and across disciplines and between academic and non-academic communities.

2.2.3 Our researchers will define the next generation of research challenges, set agendas for addressing enduring and emerging challenges, lead the advancement of knowledge and develop innovative applications of knowledge and ideas for the benefit of people and communities.

2.3.1 Our Essex Spirit is founded on a commitment to ‘radical innovation’, to be ‘freer, more daring, more experimental’ in meeting the challenges and needs of each generation, including the needs of industry. Inspired by our inquisitive and ambitious Essex Spirit, our students and staff will collaborate with and be responsive to the needs of industry, enterprise and employers, aligning our students’ learning and experiences with current, emerging and future needs and opportunities and sharing the benefits of our transformational research and education with communities beyond our campuses.

2.3.2 As an innovation and enterprise ecosystem, our Knowledge Gateway offers a unique opportunity to benefit people and communities through entrepreneurship and enterprise. We will continue to develop the Knowledge Gateway to enable easy access to the knowledge base, talent pipeline and research and development expertise of the University.

2.3.3 Partnerships between our tenants, researchers, educators and students across the University’s disciplines and departments will enable us to support social, commercial and cultural entrepreneurship, to engage our local and regional communities in the research and education mission of the University, to share our facilities and to collaborate on programmes of innovation and enterprise that benefit people and communities, globally, nationally and regionally.

2.4.1 Our success in realising our ambitions for transformational education and research is rooted in the environments in which we live, learn and work, and powered and enabled by the services we deliver for the University community.

2.4.2 We will develop creative and scalable, streamlined and efficient, intelligent and supportive services, to meet the needs of a community of around 20,000 students and 1,000 researchers in 2025. This will be achieved through creative partnerships across our sections and departments and with our students. We will be agile in seeking out opportunities to innovate, to harness the power of new ideas and knowledge and to identify the most effective ways of realising our ambitions.

2.4.3 People are at the heart of our services: our dedicated and professional teams will identify, develop, implement, refine and deliver highly-functioning services and systems that meet the needs of staff and students by creating the environments in which transformational education and research can flourish.