 Hi, everyone. Just while our slides are loading, we'll introduce ourselves. So my name is Yolli and I'm from the University of Melbourne. And I work in the Office of the Provost where we're really looking at student voice strategy and also how to involve students in university governance and kind of strategy creation at that university-wide level. And also looking at how we can promote a culture more broadly across the university of student and staff partnership. And I'm joined by... Thanks, Yolli. Hi, everybody, here in the room and in Zoomland. I'm Allie. I'm studying a fine art degree in photography at our South Bank campus in Melbourne. And yeah, I am a student facilitator with Sean, who you're going to meet in a minute. And yeah, it's my pleasure to be here today. Hi, everyone. My name is Sean. And yeah, I'm studying Bachelor of Design, majoring in landscape architecture. And yes, both me and Allie are student peer facilitators. And we have joined with Yolli to work in this new initiative set up by the university called the Melbourne Student Forum. And we're really excited to share that with you guys today. So before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge the Jagara people who we're meeting, the lands we're meeting on today. And also acknowledge the unceded lands of the University of Melbourne's campus, the Wurundjeri people and the Boonurung people. So as Sean mentioned, we're going to be sharing a little bit about the Melbourne Student Forum, a new program that we launched this year. And just to give you a little bit of context, I think it's the first time in the university's history we've had student voice explicitly mentioned in our strategies. And this gives us a real opportunity to say, okay, we have this kind of direction that we want to welcome students as partners into our university's governance and decision making. Not only do we have it now in our strategies, but the Vice Chancellor recently posted on LinkedIn, it's really important to hear from our students. So we also have leadership. Our provost is extremely dedicated to this concept as well. So we're in a kind of ground swell moment at the university. And I guess we as the Office of the Provost were thinking, okay, if we're going to lead a strategy on this, we need to be leading by example and thinking about how we're bringing students into that kind of university-wide strategy and direction as well. And that's where the Melbourne Student Forum was born. Amazing. Thank you, Yoli. So yes, the Melbourne Student Forum was an initiative set up by the University of Melbourne in which we gathered a hundred diverse students to really talk about their issues and experiences that's relevant to them at the time at this more broad university scale so the university can start to better itself from that student point of view. And one thing that a lot of speakers have mentioned today is this idea of diversity when setting up these groups and that is a big part of this forum itself. This idea of diversity is really relevant in which that hundred group is made up of a range of diverse students ranging from postgraduate to undergraduate international students and just a whole bunch of different diverse groups. So we really wanted to highlight that. Additionally, as I mentioned, these are forums that were set up to deal with the university issues from that student point of view which Ali will mention a little bit later on. But yep, these issues are relevant to the students at a time and they are chosen by the students and will continue to be chosen by the students moving forwards. Initially, there were senior staff present at these forums such as the Deputy Vice Chancellor, Pip Nicholson and the Pro Vice Chancellor, Jamie Evans. But one thing to notice was that while this forum was to set up the students to talk about their own experiences, we want to make sure the staffs weren't present at the tables themselves. So we had lots of different tables which maybe a group of six students were talking about their own experiences while the staff were off to the side just actively listening just to make sure to sort of scare those students away from sharing those experiences. Amazing, and now we're actually going to show you a quick video to sort of summarise what the Melbourne Student Forum was about. When I first entered uni into 2018, I felt really lost. I didn't know where to go for help. I didn't know where the services are and I don't have anyone to have my back. Yeah, you won't feel like strongly engaged on campus. And what we're doing in the Melbourne Student Forum is to find out those pain points and tackle them hands-on as students. It's really important as a current student that you're also paving the way for what you wish maybe your experience would have been for future students. So yes, you're talking for your present voice but you're also creating an impact that hopefully is going to last a really long time for future students and I think that's really important work. And I think it's just very fun to meet new people and get to know them, their ideas and like their different experiences because I think it's very interesting to have experience that is so vastly different. In the same campus, like we're all studying in the same place and yet we're all so different. So I think that's the most interesting part. I reckon it's a great opportunity to have a say. I just say, even if you don't know if you're quite confident in doing it, just do it anyway. It's very friendly environment on the tables where we discuss matters and then you submit stuff through your phone. So it's not like you have to speak in front of a lot of people. So even if you're a bit shy, I still reckon, I definitely recommend to sign up and I think it's a great opportunity. So hopefully that gives you a little taste of what it's like in the room at these forums. And that's what I would speak a little bit about how students were recruited and selected for the forum. So essentially, we made it as easy as possible to apply. Literally the only thing we required was your student ID. Nothing else. We didn't want to know that you were really motivated or you were the best student or anything else. We just wanted a group of students to be together, to have dialogue together. We advertised that broadly through different staff teams, newsletters on the student portal. And we also sent a direct email invitation to a random sample of students as well. From that process, we got about 700 students interested in participating. And we used a kind of stratified lottery to make sure we had representative amounts of undergraduate, postgraduate, international, domestic range of other areas. We actually even used student experience survey results. So we knew we had a mix of students that had high senses of belonging, but also low senses of belonging, high student satisfaction, low student satisfaction so that we were hopefully engaging a range of perspectives as well as demographics. And then we also followed that up once as well with a survey to the students to self-identify as different diversity groups if they wished to make sure that we had representation of other diversity areas such as LGBTQIA+, students with disability, other areas as well. And from that process, we collected, you know, a group of around 120 students. And, you know, coming into that room in the forum, and I don't know if Sean and Ellie agree, it really was such a vibrant group of students who were open to discussing together and debating and having dialogue from all corners of the university, which was wonderful to see. I'll hand over to Ellie to talk a little bit about how the forum runs. Thank you, Ellie. Yes, just a little rundown on all the topics that we covered over the four different forums that were held at Melbourne University. Those topics include student well-being, academic integrity in the context of artificial intelligence, which definitely is a hot topic at the moment, teaching quality and career readiness. And before we started those forums and when all the students came into the room, we also offered some training beforehand, which was really fantastic. Just trying to set the expectations of the forum, provide a little bit more information about what a forum is and what we want to kind of get out of it, and also ways to have respectful discussions and setting up different case studies of what to do if you're at the forum and you're sitting on a table and there's a really loud voice and you're feeling silenced by that, had to kind of counteract that. So we went through different strategies of really empower students to feel comfortable and create that safe space, which is really important for us and that's the intention of the forum too. We want students to feel empowered and ready and feel like they have a purpose. It's not to intimidate, it's not to make them feel bad, it's to really, yeah, rise them up. And ways that we gathered that feedback and data, we did it in a few different ways. We did table discussions, which was really fantastic for students to mingle and get to know each other. That was really great for us to see. Love a chit-chat. And also for those that don't really want to talk or kind of are fearful of public speaking, we had means of collecting data and recommendations online through Polis, which was a really fantastic tool. I don't really know how to describe it, Yollie's great at it, so if anyone has questions of how to use Polis, and outcomes, we gathered all that data from those different means of collecting the data into reports that were then shared with students, with student unions, which was really fantastic, uniting with them, and also really key staff decision makers and those higher up. So, yeah. Passing to Yollie now. Thanks, Yollie. And just on the topic of student unions, I guess I just wanted to mention the collaboration process we had with them around this project. So Melbourne University has an extremely long standing history and a very strong and active student union culture. So it was really important that we're working on something like the forum that it was in partnership with them. And there was initial tensions and we were able to, through a process, work out how it could be complimentary rather than a kind of a duplication. So now the student unions attend to each of the forums themselves, benefit from the additional discussion from perhaps students that they might not otherwise hear from, and reports are shared with them. They come to the training, et cetera, et cetera. So it's been a process of collaboration and we're now in a really good place. In terms of what the impact of the discussions at the forum has resulted in, I can share a couple of examples. So for example, on the forum that was held around artificial intelligence and academic integrity, one of the key recommendations from students in the room was to have a positive narrative around academic integrity. And that's kind of revolutionised the way we think about academic integrity at the university. Now it has become the first piece of advice to staff to say when talking to students, talk about the benefits of academic integrity rather than go straight to the kind of penalisation and how you might be in a lot of trouble essentially. Another example is we had a forum on teaching quality and the discussions have gone directly into a new educational excellence framework that is how teachers are rewarded, recognised for their work and sort of promoted as well. So there's some tangible outcomes from the recommendations themselves but I think as always in student voice work the process itself is the most transformative part of the program. So the student delegates who participate, we know they have greater sense of belonging and had connections between each other. The other really important part of this program is it's acted as a beacon for the rest of the university to think about how they will respond to student voice strategy. So I heard the Dean of Engineering say on a panel just the other day that they've looked to this model and now thinking about what they're going to do in the Faculty of Engineering to sustain with student services, they're thinking about how they might work with student voice themselves. So hopefully trying to scale the impact past the actual forum itself to other ways of doing it around the university. I'll hand over to Sean to speak about some of the other impacts. Amazing. So another one of the big impacts that we had with the moment to the forum is it's almost flow on effect that it had. Essentially there was another parallel forum that was run for staff, the staff forum in which Ali mentioned before that one of the forums was Quality of Teaching where this staff forum was a gathering of a hundred staff to talk about teaching quality at the University of Melbourne. What was amazing was that we had several of our student delegates who participated in the Melbourne Student Forum attend the staff forum as well so they could start working with those staff to develop these frameworks and develop these recommendations that work into that educational excellence and I think what's such an amazing thing about the forum itself that gives these students an opportunity to see these real tangible results and that process that Yoli mentioned is starting to happen at the university and hopefully they can see those results later on. Beautiful. Thanks so much Sean. And yeah, just to end our little presentation we just thought we'd talk about some reflections and for me it's been a really eye-opening, beneficial, rewarding experience. Not only have I felt more connected to my university as an institution but also connecting with other students that I wouldn't necessarily have an opportunity to and that's across different courses just because I am in fine art and we're quite separated. I got to mingle and mix with medical students, law students, art students, science students, design students and really broaden my network personally but also just sharing the role with Sean and our other facilitators and Yoli has been incredible and also just the personal development for the students that did attend the forum a lot of them at the end came to us saying how their public speaking skills have improved and how they feel more confident in themselves and how they felt welcome to voice their own opinion and also just respecting and acknowledging the fact that everyone holds a different opinion and we're able to hear those differing views and yeah. Amazing. For me what's such amazing thing about the Melbourne student forum was this idea that due to the nature of it, it can become a little bit cynical, a little bit negative as we are asking these students to talk about these issues and these prompts that they can start to fix the university but during the teaching quality forum that we ran, we actually ran a little exercise in which during the break we gave these students little pamphlets for them to write to their teacher if they wanted to, their teacher at the university just a nice little message saying amazing teacher and having about 100 students wrote these notes it was totally optional but they just wanted to do it voluntarily and wrote these notes to their teachers and it was a really positive sense positive outcome from a little bit of a negative day but what's really important is that during these times where we are talking about some cynical topics we really do want to value and really want to thank those teachers that have done an amazing job so thank you so much for listening to our student voice today any questions? here we go very simple question so how often do you run the student forum? so this year we ran it twice a semester so four times a year and how do you do them only in person or do you how do you facilitate them? this year we did them in person it's something we're grappling with and to be honest when I saw the practitioner workshop it was well in the dual delivery so it's been inspired by that but yes we're looking at how else we can involve online students as well and do you do them during semester time? what time? so this year we ran them in weeks four and eightish yeah but no no no yeah yeah hi that was amazing I just had one question about the recruitment so the 600 students who were not selected do you keep them in consideration for the next forum or do you just send them an email that you're not sorry how do you manage that? it's heartbreaking to know that there's people who want it and this is that point this morning as well about the hard to reach university so what we try to do is send them a list of other things to become involved with so whether it be the student unions some of the student service services, student voice activities other co-curricular opportunities and that's kind of why I'm thinking with the strategy had on this is not the be an all and end all at all because even with 100 which is a larger group than we may typically do a workshop with it's still very limited in the context of 60,000 students so what we're really aiming to do is to get a culture of student voice happening at the university where many staff and students are working at all sorts of scales together and yeah that's like an ongoing project yeah very good question though and just to add to that I think we also see as that we're learning and kind of going along with this process as much as the students are trusting us with this new initiative as we only started this year so it's like our baby and we've put it out into the world but it's still very flexible and we're gathering not only feedback on how to improve the uni but we collected feedback at the end of each forum of how can we improve and what do you want to see and how can we do better so in ten years time the Melbourne look completely different to how we're running it right now and that's why we're just excited for the future because one of our questions is like what's next how can we improve this so we're really trying to gather that feedback and just see it grow and evolve over time so yeah just want to add to that we have maybe one last question from online Edith Cohen University would like to know what the budget for these forums are annually so budget looks like the cost is essentially catering and my job and paying student facilitators so we employ first semester we had three student facilitators who've shown Ali are paid and then the next semester we upped it to five but catering is probably catering for a hundred people over lunch is pretty expensive but that's yeah that's our budget yeah excellent and they do have a second part to the question sorry which is if you have an MND framework is it possible to talk about this a little bit can I have some clarification on MND thank you thank you yes so to me there is a number of layers to the evaluation of this program there is the student delegates experience and for that I showed a little bit we kind of surveyed them before they began the experience how well what is your sense of belonging to the institution how do you think the University of Melbourne responds to student voice questions like that to see and then surveyed them the same questions after the program see if there was a change in perception as well as each as Ali mentioned each kind of forum we mentioned of what went well that day from a kind of programmatic level and then there's the recommendations that actually come out and what impact they have that is a slower process because some of the recommendations will take years some of them are more instantaneous like I mentioned the teaching excellence framework and the academic integrity recommendations we were able to make some changes in the moment and then there's the layer of influence of student voice culture around the University and that's something I'm monitoring with faculties and others so I can give you an idea of some of the layers we're looking at yeah all good thank you excellent thank you very