How CIT & Cisco Put Students at the Centre of Campus Design

When the Canberra Institute of Technology moved to its new Woden campus, the institution found itself with challenge of accommodating the same number of students in a smaller footprint. It also needed to serve a genuinely diverse population, and do so without compromising security.

The answer, CIT CIO Craig Neiberding said, was to treat technology as infrastructure for learning outcomes rather than infrastructure for its own sake. In Cisco, it found a technology partner that aligned with that approach.

"I believe the difference between a partnership and a vendor is a partner is there with you through the journey," Neiberding said. "Cisco has actually been there through our co-design, working alongside us and the students to design what the future of learning looks like."

That co-design philosophy extended to CIT's integration with its existing e-learning system. Rather than deploying technology and stepping back, Cisco worked with CIT staff to embed its tools into existing workflows and train educators to use them. "They haven't just been there to give us technology in a room," Neiberding said. "They've been there throughout the whole journey."

(Craig Neiberding, CIO, CIT)

The early numbers suggested the approach landed. CIT recorded more than 13,000 hours of digital activity in the first 10 weeks of the initiative, a figure Neiberding described as evidence that both staff and students adapted quickly. Hybrid learning was embraced across all campuses, and students were using the technology in common areas where no formal training had even been delivered.

Inclusivity was built in from the start rather than retrofitted. Live transcription and AI-driven accessibility tools were treated as foundational components, not optional additions. "Accessibility needed to be part of the everyday learning experience," Neiberding said. "It's cemented in our CIT values with belonging, through respect, equality, and inclusion."

Security received the same treatment. For Reg Johnson, Director of Education and Strategic Industries at Cisco ANZ, one of the central challenges facing education institutions is the complexity that accumulates when security is layered onto existing infrastructure rather than built into its foundations. "CIT have done this really well through Craig's vision and his execution around being able to remove a lot of that complexity," Johnson said. Simplifying the environment reduces the threat surface. The two goals, Johnson argued, are not in tension.

For CIT, the timing coincided with a broader shift in how audio-visual technology is delivered. Johnson described a convergence away from legacy AV systems toward AV over IP, which opens new capabilities for learning environment design. That shift, combined with the pressure on operating budgets that every education institution faces, is accelerating transformation across the sector.

(Reg Johnson, Director of Education and Strategic Industries, Cisco ANZ)

The urgency is compounded by AI. Johnson pointed to the federal government's national AI plan, which identified capability gaps as a priority concern for Australia's global competitiveness. The TAFE sector sits directly in the path of those pressures, given its historically close relationship with industry and its role in workforce training.

"We've gone from a world where AI has appeared in our education landscape very quickly, and the need to go from training into agentic AI now, and then moving through to the physical AI world is presenting challenges just purely at the pace it's moving," Johnson said.

Neiberding was direct about what that pace demands from technology strategy. "In two years, we don't even know what the world's going to look like," he said. "We need to have the right technology that supports us to scale and move with it."