 I'm the student well-being manager for Torrens University, so a big part of my role is overseeing their student engagement, well-being and all aspects of the student community. So I feel pretty privileged to work closely with our students, mainly through the student representative councils and help to empower the student boys by assisting in the facilitation of their ideas and insights. So this ultimately informs many of the initiatives, not only within my space, but within the wider organisation too. So Torrens is a relatively young university. We have campuses in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Blue Mountains, Lure, Brisbane, New Zealand and a campus in China and we offer a range of courses from business hospitality, design, health and education. You know Torrens is particularly committed to embedding this culture of students as partners and it's something that I'm personally very passionate about being part of. The issue of having multiple campuses though does present certain challenges but we're finding that through continued collaboration with our varied and diverse cohort of students we're beginning to see positive changes come about. So today we'll be talking to you a little more about this exciting journey that we've embarked on from from our staff and student perspectives and where we hope to elevate the student boys even further. So I'm going to hand it over to Josephine to offer our welcome to country and to introduce the rest of the team. Hi everyone, thanks Sarah. Before I begin my part though, I just wanted to double check Sarah, do you have the slides up or am I the only one that can't see them? The slides are up in the kitchen there, I'm so sorry. Okay perfect, no I just wanted to make sure before we went through the whole thing. No, no that's all good. All right so hi everyone, my name is Josephine and I'm the student community coordinator at Torrens University so I've been in this role for around four months now. All right so before we begin the proceedings I would like to acknowledge, I would like to acknowledge the slides have just disappeared Sarah. Yeah yeah they'll bring them back. Anyway I'll carry on. I would like to acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today. For the other speakers and myself, we are joining you from Gurungai Country, Gadaguland, Gwana Country, Stony Creek Nation and Nam Country. As we share our own knowledge, teaching, learning and research practices within this university, may we also pay respect to the knowledge embedded forever within the Aboriginal custodianship of country. Awesome next slide, perfect. So kicking off here is our symposium presentation abstract. I won't get too into it as you'll be hearing all about it very soon as we continue along through the presentation but in a nutshell what we're really here to do today is to highlight and provide transparency around the work that Torrens University is doing to bring together the student community and provide opportunities for them to share their ideas, concerns and opinions in a meaningful way as well as open up discussion around what we're doing as an institution with everyone here today. And presenting with us today we have a panel of amazing students, Gino Choi, Chloe Hiller, Jessica Delos-Reyes, Tan Lamho, Evan Carrasen, Simon Helgath-Jolly who will also introduce themselves as they come up. So there are a number of ways that we're working to provide these opportunities for increased student participation and we'll be speaking to these over the course of the presentation with the academic board representatives and the student representative councils being obvious primary platforms. However, this year we've introduced a number of ambassador programs not only in my space of student community but also through customer service, service design and in our social enterprise. So in addition to this we're striving to ensure that we have student representation in both our internal working groups and with our external partners. So this work kicked off with the development of our student voice policy. So this started back in September 2021 with the discussion paper for feedback. The policy is currently being drafted and will go for academic board review at the end of the year. So I know that there's a fair bit on the slide but essentially for us the key messages from the discussion paper for us are really about creating this sense of belonging and community with our students and that we're striving to create this culture of students as partners but we also understand that we have a responsibility to offer the training and support that will give our students the skills and confidence to effectively communicate their messages. So at this point I'm going to hand over to Simon, his current Bachelor of Counseling student and former student representative on the academic board. Hi everyone, yes so as Sarah mentioned I've been on the academic board for the last two years. As the Think Education member we have three members, one for sort of each branch of the university and we also have a student member of the Learning and Teaching Committee as well and those roles are the representative roles but we also have the opportunity to to express ourselves as individuals and bring our own sort of knowledge and experience to the role as well and it was a little bit of an intimidating experience to begin with. I guess not having sort of any work experience in higher education but everyone was very very welcoming and respectful of us and our feedback and our questions were always very respectfully addressed and often did results in action and being taken which was great, it's nice to be able to contribute and feel like you're making a difference. So as part of our role we sort of stay involved with, they like us to either be SSC members or at least involved with the SSC. I wasn't an SSC member but I attended the, we have every trimester we have an SSC summit where all the SSC members from around Australia and New Zealand get together so I was always present at those so any issues that the SSC wanted raised with the board people could talk to me about that and we would pass on that feedback and I guess I was encouraged to join the academic board just because I really love the culture at Torrance, it really is very student-centred and it sounds obvious but and I imagine there you know sometimes you hear that sort of thing, but they really mean it at Torrance and so I was sort of excited to have an opportunity to be part of maintaining and developing that culture and I really feel like I've been able to do that in the role. We've also had other opportunities to be involved in consultation opportunities so I'm one of the students that was involved in the development of the student voice policy and that's a really exciting development that's just sort of further formalising you know the roles of the SSC and the people on the on the academic board and just ensuring that any feedback is always responded to and that sort of thing, there's a lot of great stuff in there so we're really excited to see that come to fruition as we've also been involved in things like learning and teaching symposiums where students and teachers get together and discuss you know I guess sort of the nuts and bolts of classroom issues and that sort of thing and all that feedback gets passed on and gets acted on and we always hear back which is really great from whichever way that we you know are giving feedback and there's annual surveys and things like that too and you know we always you know hear what happens as a result of the of the feedback that's given. There's also been some focus groups and we also had a working group to help offshore online students feel more engaged and part of the student community which was a particular issue during during COVID with all the when students couldn't you know couldn't come to Australia and yes so we've had some really good results from all of that that for example the university's employed students to provide sort of student services support in the in the student Facebook group that we created because quite often people come there looking for looking for support so that's been a really good development and the uni's also worked hard based on our feedback to communicate better both via email and with the student hub just some you know refinements and better information on there for us yeah and then we've got the student voice policy so yeah it's it's you know any students out there you know I really encourage them to to get involved in governance or on any boards they can they can get on with the university or within the src it's definitely worth it you know you meet people both students and and within the administration as well and and it's just just a lot of good experience it builds your confidence in in you know dealing with these kinds of things and so yeah I can't recommend it highly enough awesome so touching base on our src we have created initiatives directly in relation to student feedback so we have a list there but some takeaways from this space is that we have done a rebrand to nationally align all of our src's across our campuses for greater connection we hold a src summit twice a trimester to further promote that collaboration and transparency and we are also looking more in depth into the value ad for our src through developing training and support that is consistent across our campuses so for example we are working on a learning module which integrates our smart skills digital badges to promote their professional development. Hi hello everyone so my name is Lam and I am currently a student experience ambassador and I'm also an src member for Adelaide campus so getting the chances to participate in the focus group I am delighted that we have created a strong collaborations among the src communities across campuses so together we're making sure that src members' values of tolerance are equal and respected no matter where they are located we also inform and discuss idea to each other through the discord platform to maintain consistent communications in general so in summary I think that developing collaborations and consistency has successfully unified all different src campuses and brought our communities together as well as closer so I'm going to head over to Jess for the next part thank you. Hi my name is Jessica I am also a student experience ambassador and part of the src here in Melbourne. I was also president of the src back at my first campus in Sydney before transitioning and being an active member at another Sydney campus so experiencing both cities have definitely assisted me in how to help integrate and support the big idea of one community while embracing the differences of each city so a number of event and activities are planned on a national scale some of which are highly subsidized in addition to campus specific activities so as you can see there are a lot of picks here of national day trips which happen every trimester where students get to travel and experience a destination within their state the fact that these amazing experiences are highly subsidized make these fantastic opportunities for students for example for student for international students to experience snow for the first time for students to take a luxury cruise down Murray River the wine tasting in the Hunter Valley rock climbing on heritage listed cliffs so you can imagine these are our most successful events and we also have a smaller fund and social activities such as jet voting we also have be good be well every trimester so it is a national focus on student well-being for one week through events and activities like talks on how to utilize your brain music therapy meditation and paint and sip on campus this year we have also partnered with uni sports for the first time with the thought that building community is an important component in increasing participation in sport so seeing success in Adelaide with high participation South Australia challenge and here in Melbourne we are aiming to see sports activities happen on all of our campuses and now I will pass them to Chloe. Hi everyone I'm Chloe I'm studying a bachelor of health science clinical nutrition and I've been a student experience ambassador with Torrin since November 2021 so we have various ambassador programs in the community space as well as design um first that we have the service design ambassadors who created my hub platform an intuitive information hub and then we have the engagement ambassadors that work with the engagement team providing peer-to-peer support and then we have the student experience ambassadors who work in the student community space to assist with community management of Torrin social media via peer-to-peer support as well as facilitating the student voice podcast the student newsletter and while working closely with the src we also act as student representatives for the student voice in internal working groups and with our external partners so the outcome of the ambassador roles is to increase the connection and give authenticity as peer-to-peer interactions are often received better so I'm now going to hand over to Evan who will talk about the mentor connect opportunities thank you thank you very much Chloe hi everyone my name is Evan I am the president of the src in South Australia and I also work as a student mentor with our business students but also with some of our international students so one platform that we have here at Torrin's that works really effectively is something we call mentor connect where we hook up mentees so international students who are just arriving in Australia who might not know where to go who needs some help in I guess navigating their way through a brand new city especially when it comes to things like accommodation and jobs and we try and hook up with mentors who have already either been through that process or can provide some sort of advice and this is a wonderful program currently we have over 50 active mentors and they're about 550 mentees and we see between 25 and 30 different conversations happening through the platform every single week and this is an ongoing thing so it's not something which just happens at the beginning of a term or beginning of a trimester students are constantly reaching out to their mentor and asking for advice on where to go for this or where to go for that and it's not necessarily only about navigating their way through the systems and the services that we have at our university at Torrin's but also in general so a lot of the students who have come here after COVID are not sure where to go to get some supermarket food or how to get a transit card or anything like that and the mentors provide this wonderful service by trying to assist our international students in the customizing themselves to to whatever city they've moved to we also have a social enterprise hub at Torrin's university which is doing a wonderful job working with particularly with social enterprises all around Australia we have an internship program where we actually ask students to intern to use their work hours that they need to qualify for part of their degrees and actually intern within the hub to actually work with each other on projects for social enterprises and then deliver the project result back to the client and say to the client this is what our students have delivered and the client obviously has the choice whether to implement the project or not but we have seen great success in that so we currently have about 180 different projects that we're working within our social enterprise hub and there are four to five students that are working on each of those projects across subjects and also across the interns as well which is a wonderful thing so our students are really succeeding in the social enterprise hub and are doing very well and this is another way where students can get together and exchange ideas talk about what's happening at university offer themselves some assistance it also provides a great platform for students to improve their well-being as well we find that students who are integrating with each other on projects at sometimes outside of the university in the social enterprise hub but also in the mental connect program are finding themselves getting a lot better they're doing better grades they're being more motivated and they're really starting to access the services that we have at university to uh to try and improve their well-being I'll now pass off to get Sarah uh no I wouldn't it would be myself Jen I'll pass over to you thank you oh good yeah hi um hi everyone um my name's uh you know but everyone does call me Jen um I'm also a student experience ambassador at Torrance uh but my main role is as SRC president for online students um I'm a bachelor of business and event management uh all these studying online I really just want to briefly touch about student participation both externally and internally and one of the things with Torrance being a fairly young institution uh we've thought of we're still learning along the way on what's the best approach in terms of student participation and I guess because we are such a young institution we aren't sort of burdened by some of the hurdles from some old institutions where they might have limited passions or traditions which sort of don't include participation as much so one of the things that we try to do is get students involved and do things externally whether that be things like uh hexa's community practice uh one example is uh is the sash community practice which I'm part of uh but also things like SVA in terms of student voice of joy in terms of our ability to learn from other institutions but also uh to share our experiences as well and more recently in any sports to be able to um just to enhance that connection with other universities uh from an internal point of view we uh we have a range of ways that uh we encourage student participation from our EC meetings which are really close and intimate meaning that we have with the Vice Chancellor sort of where nothing is off the agenda but we really have that opportunity to have that heart to heart conversation and often because you don't have the other levels of structure you're really having that conversation right with the uh with the singular levels of measurements and nothing really gets in the way which is really important from us to make sure that we're getting our message across uh to um to the Vice Chancellor um the particular interest is my and uh what I'm also involved in is the mental health and uh state of the community's action group um because I think it's really important for student engagement to be part of that conversation and actively be involved and that's from all levels uh well we discuss these issues such as uh the right way things are reported uh things around training um to enhance uh everyone's understanding of things like consent and cultural competencies but in essence there there are a whole number of ways that we try to get involved but I think it's really important for us uh that we have that engagement and participation at all levels and I believe Evan you're making a quick comment on some of the student led initiatives yeah thank you very much Jim so just quickly again everyone another thing that we do we we really try to engage our students into asking them what well being activities they would like but also more importantly what well-being means for them so I think it's all well and good for us to sit here and tell students what well being is but by asking the students what does well being mean to you we can then cater and design programs to assist them one thing that we've done here in South Australia which is where I'm from is speak to our international students predominantly where there can be a bit of a stigma around some of the mental health issues and certainly around well-being and say what does it mean to you what would you like us to do for you and by resounding demand we've had a lot of students say we would love to be able to get together on campus or online whatever it is and just chat just chat about stuff it doesn't have to be about anything in particular just somewhere we can unload and talk about anything that's not university oriented so what we're devising here we're going to pilot this program here in South Australia that certainly implemented nationally in 2023 is a student well-being club and we're not quite sure of what the name is going to be yet but where we just ask the students to get together and it could be a very casual chat and thought we could be playing games we're watching a movie but just something to get the students away from their university life where they can just relax and talk about well-being if they want to we also want to incorporate some mental health aspects into the club as well by inviting counsellors and professionals to actually come in maybe once a month or so and talk about things that students are interested in how do we cope with anxiety when we're studying in our exams and timetables how can we cope with these things how do we reduce the stigma around mental health so that's one thing initially that we're following here in SA the implement in a couple of weeks time I think it's a small club but then taking it nationally next year thank you all righty nearly there everyone thanks Evan so after hearing about all of these things and even with the ground that we have made of course there are always going to be challenges especially as we work across different campuses and engage with a variety of different stakeholders too so one of the main challenges that we face is awareness or the lack of it of what we and our students are working on and are putting out there in relation to that engagement is also a challenge as we're not I was not really seeing the numbers or attendance that we would like to across our campuses as for other challenges we're also concerned around closing the feedback loop to our students how we use our available resources and how do we visibly measure our success or failure or what impact we have so definitely there are a lot of key challenges we're facing and working through but of course we'd love to learn from others and everyone here too so we don't have the answers to any of those questions yet but essentially our next steps for 2023 will be to I guess we've kind of done things a little bit back to front in that we started working in this space really by solving the simplest problems first essentially the quick fixes you know we realized that the last year of work is not unique it's not particularly groundbreaking however it was a necessary starting point for moving forward with this so once we have the student voice policy finalized at the end of this year the primary focus certainly within my team for the beginning of next year will be to kind of pull together all the work that we've done into a more formalized strategic framework which was why I was so excited with Elizabeth's presentation before and essentially used this to guide how we amplify the student voice further and how we can increase student initiatives that promote diversity safety and well-being for our students but then also how we can look to increase the reach across the organization and so for us it's critical to kind of identify how we can feedback this information to the wider student body outside of those highly engaged students you see before you and kind of close the feedback loop so in addition we'll as always we'll be guided by our students and hopefully gain some valuable lessons and insights through our partnership with student voice Australia and our participation in events such as this hopefully learn from other universities a little further along the journey than us so that concludes our presentation thank you very much thank you so much everybody now we've only got a few minutes left but the next workshop isn't till 2 30 so we do have some time for questions if people are available to hang around over to the floor if anyone has any questions I have a question if there's none I was interested about you spoke about the SRC using Discord as their communication platform can you tell me a bit about how you made the decision to choose that platform and is it only peer-to-peer or is there engagement with staff through the platform as well I'm happy to speak to this one so there was some debate around which platform this should be and with six different SRC's you can imagine it was hotly debated between teams Facebook Discord so and that that conversation was initiated by me when I when I first started a year ago and then because we couldn't we couldn't come to a decision I left it and then the students between themselves worked it out and they came back and that's where they landed the Discord so there are a few key staff members there in there but essentially that platform is for students to engage with students as a staff member I don't use it unless I need our content for the podcast or something that relate to their space that they're in it anyway and that's essentially what it's for is an opportunity for them to have those dialogues outside of anything being instigated by my team or any other staff member so well that's really interesting thank you because yeah we had an initial approach to our SRC or our senate at USC and we landed on teams but Discord was kind of our other option yeah I understand that everyone has their own preference and how did you land on teams then did you have a vote because I don't imagine it was unanimous I'm just interested in the process no it wasn't we mainly chose it because we we needed a platform that could engage with staff as well and that was one that was a little bit more I guess one that staff members we could control who was in and out of it from the student's perspective as reps came and went so it was and also employability was one that we spoke about with that platform learning teams that that they could take that to to their workplace afterwards