Professor Simon Barrie

Professor Simon Barrie, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice President (Academic) at Western Sydney University, presented at the Sydney Semi Permanent Creativity and Design Festival in 2018 where the theme was "Creative Tension as Inspiration".

Professor Simon Barrie is responsible for leadership of strategic educational innovation and collaboration to shape the University’s commitment to ensuring its students fulfill their potential to become influential global citizen-scholars in a new technology-enabled world. His expertise is in innovatively engaging university communities to deliver new ways to enact the ‘idea of the university’ in a rapidly changing world.

Professor Barrie has worked in the field of Higher Education for over 25 years and is an award-winning teacher with an international reputation for his research on the transformative potential of higher education. He has led major national research and development projects to support Australian universities in the renewal of their educational programs to meet the needs of a new generation of learners and the demands of an uncertain future in today’s radically disrupted world of work. Professor Barrie's work links the learning demands of the new knowledge economy with educational innovation in new learning ecosystems, using the mechanisms of academic development and collaborative institutional leadership of transformative educational change.