 Experiences, a number of experiences that myself and a fairly large team of set of teams of students have had over the last few years. Sense of belonging is something that's on many universities minds at the moment, especially as we're emerging from the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. And some of the work that we've done over the last few years has attempted to address that directly with varying levels of success. So I'm going to share our stories with you today. To give some context, my university, the University of Queensland operates a centrally run student staff partnership scheme called SSP, whose mission statement is written here. Many academics tap into this scheme to give you some key statistics. We have four rounds per year projects are fairly short, although up to a semester in duration. And the student partners each receive a grant up to $1,500 for their work on the project. The broad aim of all of these projects is in some way to enhance the university experience of students and staff and indeed the university's operations more broadly. And the scheme runs in three different categories of projects. Governance and strategy, student experience and teaching and learning. So a student, a group of students or a staff member or group of staff members will propose a project in one of these three areas. And then successful projects are awarded funding and then a number of student partners are assigned and recruited to each project based on a competitive selection process. Most of the projects that are run at UQ fall in the latter two categories, teaching and learning in particular as well as student experience. And those are the categories that the projects I'm talking about today have fallen within. So what we've done is a range of projects over time. We've seen the benefits of engaging with students through these mechanisms. We started off a number of years ago by engaging a group of students to road test some new technologies for teaching science topics. Based on the success of that particular project that we then launched into other projects and curriculum design. Student experience crossover into curriculum design by thinking about particular challenging points in the students progression. Some of our students implemented what they call the success program I'll share with you a little bit about. There was a peer learning group, some other students have worked on academic integrity. And then most recently we've been looking at ways to enhance the inclusiveness of our teaching program or programs in science. So there's a whole variety of different project topics here. We didn't design this as a long term scheme we have just built on the success of each individual project to inform the design of the subsequent ones. All together so far there have been a nine projects in this series which have offered a combined total of places to your 27 student places. So with that as our background, I'm going to share with you three of the projects today to showcase how they have been able to be of mutual benefit to the students themselves and their own personal development, but also the universities teaching and student experience operations more broadly. The very first project where we began things was as I said road testing new teaching technologies. So at that point in time there was a science course that needed to acquire a piece of software to teach a new kind of scientific technique to students in the undergraduate programs. There were a whole range of different software options available. So what we did was get together a group of students representing a range of different year levels and backgrounds and got the first of all together around the table to share their perspectives on the benefits and challenges associated with learning this particular new area of science. After that was done, we then had our team of students road test to actually sit down and work through a series of activities simulating what it would be like to utilize some of those potential teaching technologies in classroom settings. Based on the outcomes of the students work, we were able to identify the best piece of software to use, and then that enabled us to apply for a grant from the university to cover the purchase and installation of that software. And the students input has been vital because they have really helped us select the best teaching technology, not only is it scientifically very sound, but the overall experience that the students get out of it. They find that they actually really enjoy interacting with this new teaching technology to the extent that they use it outside of class hours for their own independent study. So that was our first success. The second successful project that we embarked on was really to help students transition from first to second year. And to give you some context as to why this is important at UQ like at many other universities, the first to second year transition is a very pivotal one in students academic development. In first year courses, you typically find that the number of students enrolled in any course is huge. It can be more than a thousand students. There's typically a fairly standard mix of delivery modes, lectures, workshops, practical courses, classes. But the thing about it is that the experience of being a student in one of those courses is often time regarded as a somewhat anonymous experience because of the large numbers and the well, yeah, basically the large numbers of students, which means that when a student goes to a class, whoever they're sitting next to is probably not interested in the same area of science that they are. And so it's not easy to form a peer network under those conditions. That all changes when you move to second year because here now the courses are much more focused smaller class sizes, about 100 students now per course. The same general mix of delivery styles, but the real key difference is that now the students who are taking any particular second year course are generally speaking people who are very much interested in going on to study that topic in depth as their major area of specialisation. And so that enables a one to think about the prospect of deliberately helping students to set up peer networks. The other thing about the first to second year transition is that the pace of learning really steps up as you go from first to second year. It's something that students often find confronting. They sometimes struggle to deal with and these sorts of things for what motivated us as a student self partnership team to think about ways we could support students to manage that transition more smoothly. So what our team came up with was the idea of developing a series of short video resources, which were produced by the students and aimed to give students in the future cohorts a lot of valuable advice on how to do well in second year. And this was really, really very high quality advice that was given to the students. As you can see here, there's a series of short bite sized videos which were made available to incoming students and distilled out all of the success tips that our older student cohorts had considered to be useful for the younger students. As well as that this group also produced a set of study notes, which was also of great benefit for the students as they prepared for their exams later on in semester. So here we've seen a snapshot of the first two projects to summarize the outcomes. So far the teaching technology project or the outcome of that from the students was their recommendations for what software we should use. We then purchased that it was not cheap, but we purchased it and it has now been very eagerly taken up by students in subsequent groups. And if you think about what the student voice has contributed in terms of added value into this overall aim. Really, the students own perspectives, recommendations, experiences were pivotal for us to ensure that we made the right choice. We didn't spend our money on software which was not going to serve students within our own learning environment. For the second project I described a little video series and study notes. The tangible outcome was a series of high quality resources built by students. The value add that the student voices delivered here is that their own perspectives enabled us to identify exactly what were the most important educational challenges that are facing our students today. You could imagine academics having produced those videos themselves, but they might not have been able to really identify all of the problems and challenges that the typical second year student is facing at the moment. Now move on to the third program project and this is where we ran into some rather interesting territory. So this, we began sort of midway during 2020, which was in Brisbane, a period of online learning. And we were concerned that at that point the people who were taking first year courses in the first year of university in 2020 had not received the normal introduction to university life. And we were concerned that when they did come back onto campus, they might struggle to adjust themselves to on campus learning. So a team of students got together and designed what they call the success program, which was meant to help incoming students adjust, readjust. The idea was a two part set of activities. First of all, during O week, which is orientation week, the week before the academic year begins, we would run a welcome session where the incoming students would come along, they'd have a chance to actually meet their peers. And the older students would offer them tips on how to do the best job at succeeding with the transition from first to second year and how to make the most of their study in second year. Then accompanying that throughout semester we would follow up with a series of seminars, co-curricular activities really where students could come along for an hour at lunchtime, talk with their friends and make friends to start with, talk with them. And then at the same time learn things, tips and skills for science subjects that the third year students had thought would be useful. So first part, the welcome session went very well. We had a two hour session with ice breakers, a panel session, problem solving. Excuse me, which was a success followed by a very well received morning tea where the students got the chance to talk to their lecturers in small group settings. And this was a success. The second part then would be to follow on with the seminar series and here you can see a list of the topics that our higher level students designed. Exam tips, for example, that would seem useful. What else? Everything here was chosen because the higher level students thought that the lower level students would find it useful, help them to get ahead. Here's where the problem arose because when we ran our first seminar, the total attendance out of a class of 100 was only three. Somewhat disappointing, especially when you consider that the topic of that seminar was how to do well in the upcoming mid semester exam. Out of all the possible topics we were offering, I would have thought that would be the most popular one. Not so. We elected therefore to discontinue the seminar series and instead think about redirecting our project. In case you're wondering, the attendance at lectures coinciding with our proposed seminar program was also rather low. As you can see from this picture taken of the lecture room, for example, illustrating what it looked like from the lecturers point of view during one of the lectures in that particular course. No one is there. So our team got together and started to think about, can we identify why this group of students is not re-engaging with campus life? So they conducted focus groups, surveys and interviews, trying to find out what drives this low engagement. And on the flip side, what would drive students to re-engage in a good way with university? We got a lot of useful information out of this research exercise. And it really got us to think a lot about what does this term sense of belonging mean to students these days? It's not rocket science, is it? But from interacting with these students directly and then indirectly through the surveys and interviews as well, there are basically two key aspects of sense of belonging that a student would hope for when coming onto campus. And one, of course, is that they will feel part of a community. By community, we mean not only their friends who they would meet and look forward to meeting with each time they come onto campus, but also the academics who they interact with and learn from. The other key part of sense of belonging, though, which is perhaps less widely articulated, but nonetheless, I believe it's there, is that students feel they belong when they feel that their contributions to the university are valued. And it's interesting to reflect on what we might mean by a student's contribution to university. For a typical undergraduate student engaging simply by coming up and learning, well, the contribution is simply that they do that. They form a visible presence on campus, they form part of the learning community, and they make their best effort to learn in the courses that they're taking. But I think for when we think about this through the lens of SSP, Students Self Partnerships, you can think a little bit beyond that because through a Student Self Partnership project, the students involved in that project are making tangible, meaningful contributions to the university beyond simply what they normally would do day to day by turning up and coming to lectures and so forth. In other words, they are being given the agency to create positive change within their environment. One thing that we learned, and this really touches on one of the real benefits of Student Self Partnership projects, we learned from when we stepped outside of science-based thinking and looked at comparing how science courses teach compared with education courses. And there are key differences. Typically in a science lecture, you would have a lecture theatre, the lecturer at the front giving a PowerPoint presentation, students in the seats taking notes, listening closely. Conversely, in education lectures here at UQ and elsewhere, of course, they typically are delivered more in a collaborative style, so you might have students sitting around small tables. And there's a lot of focus on discussion amongst students. They build their own understanding of different concepts and shape their own learning journey in an active way during that particular lecture. And this is very different because we came to understand that when students have the opportunity to more actively participate in that aspect of their learning, their own sense of belonging to university is boosted. We were led, well, our student team was led to develop a new solution. They came up with this idea that every week they would hold a regular meet-up where they would get together, talk about what they had learned, and share their challenges, things they might not have understood, help themselves understand things better as a group. That has been a success. It's just a small group, but nonetheless, that group which formed in semester 2021 has continued to keep up their practice of studying together into this year. Even though they weren't required to, that's what they've elected to do. And I would consider that to be a win. And it suggests that those students have realised that that particular peer network is a key to their sense of belonging to the university. And their own academic success. So to summarise these three particular projects, outcomes of them overall, well, one tangible outcome is that one cohort of students has built their own successful study network, which has continued into the following year. Another outcome is that the feedback and perspectives from the students themselves, and as well through the surveys, interviews and focus groups that we ran, really enabled the teaching staff to think about refreshing their own delivery style in their teaching. Another thing it prompted us to do was to rethink the workloads and the allocation of teaching activities across different courses. And changes that we, the teaching staff have made on those, based on those recommendations have led to a marked improvement in students course grades this year. We reported all of this to our faculty, and pleasingly, the work of these student staff partnerships was formally recognised by a number of awards. Now, thinking back to how the student voice has added value beyond what a typical academic staff member could have generated here, there's a number of things that we can identify. Firstly, and perhaps foremost, Lee, is the role or the value of the students own perspectives. There were things that students were able to share with us about the experience of learning online versus on campus, which we were able to build into our own rethought out strategy for teaching. We were also able to understand why certain measures we brought in were not successful, such as that seminar series, which is attended by only three students. We came to realise that students' study habits had been formed previously and were not being adequately changed back or readjusted because there were not enough incentives for doing so. One of the other values that the student voice has brought is that students, when relating to their peers, are able to sometimes, I suppose, touch on different topics or maybe access different types of information, then would be readily available if an academic was to simply ask that same student, that same question. And that's been valuable because it's enabled us to broaden the evidence base that we used to support our change in teaching delivery style. For the student partners themselves, benefits are, well, for the group of students who built their own network, that in itself has been a highly valuable initiative. In general, I think the students in these projects have come away with a stronger understanding of what it means for them to be a student at university today. They have more of an insight into the behind the scenes running of the university and that has translated into better confidence and understanding of their role in their learning journey. And finally, not to be underestimated by giving students the agency to contribute to meaningful positive change at university that is very important for boosting students' confidence. This brings me to this quote, which is from actually a decade ago, but Liz Thomas's quote here about what are the key most important ways to promote belonging at university. We see here four dot points, supportive peer relations, where those were definitely built into any student staff project if you've got more than one student. Meaningful interaction between staff and students, well that is also the case if you're focusing on a positive goal, a tangible outcome will emerge, confidence, etc. It's all there. I would point out that within these projects, our academic team, just to finish off, our academic team is aware that there has been a lot said and written about partnership in terms of perhaps aspiring to transform the relationship between students and staff into something that transcends the normal roles of those two people. We have never sought to do that. We have always really set clear boundaries and have very happily focused on maintaining a professional distance. Instead, what we have focused on is really celebrating what each contributor brings to the table, whatever background they have, they all have something valuable to bring. And that really prepares students, I think, well for the workplace in future where they will be expected to integrate into teams, bring their own experiences and expertise in and achieve specific goals in their workplaces. So that ends my presentation. I hope it's given you an interesting snapshot of some work that we've been doing over the period of the last three or four years and the impacts that it's been able to have on our students and their learning outcomes. Thank you. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. If there's something you think of, you can put it in the chat afterwards. Thank you, Elizabeth. That was really insightful and I can imagine the students really learned a lot from that experience of failure that you spoke of as well for the workshops that didn't work and then you had to pivot as a team to come up with a new solution. How did you navigate that as a team with the team of students who might not have had that kind of experience before? Yes, and that has been a common feature of many of our projects actually. And that's just life, isn't it? I think as a team we reflect on perhaps we're not achieving or heading as far in the right direction as we're aiming to. And I think just the flexibility to change direction if we feel that we're not, we feel that there is a better aim that we could be achieving is something that's really important to build into a student staff partnership project. Because you never know what you're going to achieve and what the real strengths of the team are going to be until you start working together. That's great. And Sarah, did you have a question? Yeah, well, not so much as the question, more of a comment really. I just wanted to say thank you. So I found it really interesting. It's a kind of a structured, formalized way of what we're trying to do where we're hoping to get to. So it was really good to see where we could potentially be in another year with the work that we're doing and that we're going to present on next. So, yeah, I found it really interesting. I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. There was a question from Louise. I just saw in the chat. Yes. Maybe I'll ask that into that quick, quick, quick. Is the partnership model widely known to the whole student cohort? It's definitely very public. I don't think it is widely known. I think the actually I see that Julia Groening is here and who might be able to comment on the exact numbers, but I think we would offer perhaps the best part of 1000s projects per year, which is a lot of opportunities for students. Something like that. I don't have the exact numbers. But so there is a lot that students can get involved in. I don't know that the entire student community does know about it, but we definitely always get, well, at least from my point of view, we've always got a lot of good applicants for all of the projects that we've had on offer. The message is definitely getting out there to good students. And it's essentially coordinated program. Is that right? Elizabeth, so it's across all faculty schools? Yes, absolutely. Any student can actually propose a project as can any staff member. Yeah, and I wonder, well, especially at our institution, if there's any program or project that all of our students know about, because even though we try our best to promote to everyone, it always misses some or some may not see it. But yeah, thank you so much. Really appreciate your contribution and thank you for all of the questions. Thank you, Elizabeth.