Qantm's Leap

David Braben recently claimed that university courses for the games industry were five years out of date, but as a route into the industry, they're becoming ever more popular.

Although it's an ongoing debate in the UK, the Qantm colleges have had success in Australia - and now they're setting up in London. To find out more about how the company, part of the SAE group, is planning on bucking the trend, we spent some time with the outspoken CEO and founder of the SAE group, Tom Misner.

Initially there was no master plan for SAE, for colleges and things, but it turned out that I invented practical education, because nobody before me was doing that. In a way I formalised education.

With that started the SAE progress, and I came to England back in 1985. I had a few schools in Australia at the time, and I came over not to open schools, but to be inspired by what the local schools were doing.

I figured London was the music centre of the world, so there had to be big schools here, so I was going to come and make some enquiries, see what they were doing, so I could take it back to Australia.

To my surprise there were no audio schools here. A friend of mine, Richard Desmond, showed me around and we investigated a little bit, but there were no audio schools, so that's how I came to England - and the same thing happened in Germany and France.

A few years back I was approached by Qantm - the history of that is that it was set up by the Australian government in combination with five universities. The government wanted a games course that had to be practically run and very commercial - which to them meant they would set up a school with lots of people on staff, give the school a AUS 1 million grant every year, charge feesâ¦and it still managed to go broke somehow.

But what they did develop, over the better part of six or seven years, was a games curriculum that is second to none. So much so that they have Electronic Arts sending students from the US down to Brisbane to study there, because the course was so well put together.

But what they did wrong was that they had 30 people on staff that weren't productive. They had a board for this, a board for that, and they were going to lose their government subsidy - so 400 students studying there would have been out on the street, and over 300 more studying various gaming modules.

So I took it over, and restructured. Which meant getting rid of 30 people on staff who were consulting, or whatever they were doing, and keeping the core teachers, improving facilities and so on.

What I noticed with audio was that the curriculum took years and years to build up, and I didn't want to have to take that long to build up the gaming one. So what we did was take a really polished university-accepted curriculum - we have a BSc - so we came in at that level and within a short period of time there were six more separate Qantm locations.

Right now they're in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, London, Berlin, Munich and Vienna.

Well there are two - the commercial challenge and the curriculum challenge. The curriculum challenge has been fairly well addressed by the fact that I bought a ten year old curriculum, which has been updated, so we knew how to teach students.

You see, in gaming there's so much to learn, so many things you have to teach, programmes to get used to, languages, on and on. What we do is filter it, teach the student what he or she needs to know, rather than just provide them with a library of books.

And that's what makes Qantm unique - we're not a university, because what people don't realise is that with a university it takes at least three years to change a course. If a lecturer now sees that companies are using a new language to program in, it'll take him three years to implement it in the course.

We can do it by the next course start date, that's the big advantage - especially gaming, which is a very fast-changing environment.

And by the fact that we teach in so many different territories, we develop changes very quickly ourselves, so we're always up-to-date, rather than trying to follow trends.

The other challenge is opening a new school. But I've got over 50 of them [including SAE-branded locations] so now really a big challenge.

Yes, it's partly that in most territories they don't have existing schools. But you move to territories to simply offer a better product. Compare it to the airlines. BA flies from London to Munich, and I know some guys at BA — it costs them GBP 54 to put you on a seat, one-way. That's what it costs them, full stop.

Easyjet charges GBP 28 return, so obviously it's a better product because they've got a better structure. That's what SAE does. We have a better product, and one of the significant aspects of being a better product is the purchasing power.

Nobody on this planet buys more Macbooks than I do. Every month we buy I don't know how many. Over the year, thousands. Our gaming students receive the new laptop, it's much faster, and that's a big part of it.

And in the UK there are so many developers, it's a growing market. You see, the gaming market is not just creating a new game — that's part of it, but there are mobile games, all the maps for GPS are based on gaming technology, so there's a much broader industry than just the creation of games like Warcraft.

North America is coming, but the problem there is that we can't just open a school — we're already going through the accreditation procedure in the background, it just takes so long. Everything has to be approved, the location has to be licensed and so on.

Well, in Singapore it's amazing, they've given all sorts of support in grants for the students. Qantm is very big in Singapore.

But what we're also doing in Singapore and Australia at this stage — and I envisage it happening in England as well — we provide the practical modules for the university education. So we become like an outsourcing company.

Universities are fine in that they are very well equipped to do BA subjects, those ones that don't have a specific use in real life, but they're not very well equipped to do the practicalâ¦even the theoretical side of a practical subject they can't do. The students are asking for fast laptops, and all they have is one 386, probably without even the right softwareâ¦

So we're looking to do here what we're doing in Australia, that's outsourcing our services to the industry, and we're quite able to customise a programme as well. For example, in England if we were told there was a greater need for language-based courses instead of creative ones, we could plan along those lines.

And also the course initially lets you cover all of the bases, then allows you to specialise depending on where your strengths are.

Well, you either know a little bit, maybe you've messed around with XNA or something, or you know nothing. And sometimes the people who know something don't learn as well as those who don't, it depends on the personality.

Sometimes the person who knows something, thinks they know a lot more than they actually do, whereas a person who is fresh just wants to learn, which I feel is a much better approach for any learning environment.