 Okay, hi everyone and thanks for joining us at the symposium. We have some absolutely great case studies coming up and I'm honored to be able to introduce the first. First of all, we have a Mr. Jonathan Gleening and a Ms. Bre Jones. They are both PhD candidates at the University of Melbourne and they're co-chairs of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, Student Advisory Council. So I'd love to just turn it over to them. The title of their case study is Amplification of Student Voice through Student Staff Co-design and Implementation of a Strategy-Focused Student Advisory Council. Hi everyone, sorry I just had to unmute myself. Before we get started I just wanted to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which this presentation takes place as the Wonduri people of the Kulin Nation and for the Elders past and present and emerging. My name is Bre Jones and I'm a PhD candidate and chair of the, or co-chair of the Student Advisory Council for Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences and I'll be presenting today with Jonathan Gleening. And hi everyone, I'm Jonathan as a certain number, 30 PhD candidate as well and the other co-chair of the Student Advisory Council within our faculty. So today, as Bre said, we're going to be discussing how we actually applied a co-design approach towards establishing and implementing a Student Advisory Council within our faculty at the University of Melbourne. And so to sort of do that we're going to go through a bit of a wheel of the different stages of the co-design process and sort of the engagement process between students and staff. So really to sort of give you a bit of a background as to why we did this, we started to do this because there was a real desire you know from senior faculty and from students and especially from the faculty's level in response to sort of data on declining student experience within the faculty. They wanted to have fostered this idea of an improved culture of student engagement between senior levels of the faculty and students and one that was really much more perspective and forward thinking. Sort of what the existing process was before that was you have a student on a committee or something like that throughout all the various faculty and departmental and school committees but it was really a lot more sort of retrospectively focused. The policy would have been made and it would be down to that committee to either implement it or to sort of work out the other the teething issues and that was where the student came in rather than coming in a lot earlier in the process where they can actually positively impact the policy being made. So there was really strong engagement from the faculty leadership team to engage with students to further develop this idea. So we had a senior leadership team which was comprised you know the dean of the faculty along with the associate dean for graduate research and the associate dean for learning and teaching and they essentially invited a bunch of different students some coursework students both post-grad and undergrad graduate research students and also members of the faculty learning and teaching unit who professional staff to come together over a series of workshops and meetings and whatever we sort of felt we needed to sort of flesh this all out and engage with them to really develop this idea further. So like Jonathan said we designed this process where we had a number of collaborative workshops. We're planned with the co-design team and so we had kind of broad representation of students from undergraduate post-graduate coursework research training and members of faculty and student support services and we all came together to kind of come up with this you know think of you know what are our these collaborative workshops really were opportunities for us to kind of unpack what our experiences are discuss kind of our hopes and visions for the faculty and to discuss how students can be engaged as meaningful partners with the faculty in decision making so it really allowed us to kind of exchange these ideas and talk about how we can grow and improve culture of collaboration with the faculty and so from this you know we decided or came up with this idea that we could implement a student advisory council that would be kind of idea generation and prospective thinking like Jonathan just mentioned. So as Bruce said this was our sort of broad decision that we would implement a student advisory council and it would be situated at the highest level of the faculty so report directly to the dean of the faculty executive committee rather than sort of sitting within you know a specific committee or lower down in the governance sort of food chain I guess and as also Bruce said this was the key thing it was designed to be a two-way street one that was both providing advice on request but also acting as this proactive idea generating body so we could go to whoever the relevant leader or stakeholder was and say look we know you're doing x y and z but we think actually you know it might be better if we could talk about this topic or you know we have an idea about that topic that that we think we'd like to discuss further with you and we'll go into those a little bit in sort of case study form in a few minutes and really we also designed the terms of reference for the student advisory council you know amongst the full co-design team and we also got a lot of advice from relevant stakeholders and leadership throughout the faculty and students throughout the faculty and we wanted to make sure we struck the right balance in terms of sort of having a very clear structure that that was that was rigid and allowed for you know that gave sort of structure purpose and a clear direction to everyone but also the flexibility to sort of change it and come up with it as we went and and really ensuring that that the students who are on this this council have the appropriate supports in place. So as Jonathan said we created this kind of student advisory council structure and so the membership consisted of 26 student volunteers and these student volunteers were drawn from the breadth and the depth of guess of programs across the faculty so we had undergraduate students that were in our various coursework programs we had postgraduate students who were in different areas of research training and whilst we wanted to make sure and they were you know drawn from a number of our different schools and research discipline areas we want to the council itself we weren't representative of every single student that exists in the faculty but we wanted to be diverse enough and have I guess another you know student voice or another body really that didn't necessarily replace any of our other existing associations that we have but enabled us to amplify the student voice within the faculty at this high level and so the student membership they had 12 month terms and students had then had the option about whether or not they wanted to have an extension. So the structure of the student advisory council really is this kind of overarching council structure with those 26 members and then it consists of two sub-councils and so one council is for coursework and then one council is for research training and the idea behind that structure really was that each of these you know different or diverse groups of students may be working with different areas of leadership and they have very different student experiences although they still want to have an overall you know a good experience within the university and each of the councils had a chair and a co-chair. The council itself in this part of the terms of reference we aim to kind of meet every two months during the year and it would be in the way that the council would meet first together as a group and then the next two months then we may have our divisions where our sub-councils meet and then we would come back together two months later as a collective council and meet and so forth and the support for our councils in terms of the executive support provided in terms of minute taking communicating to students circulating minutes and sending out paperwork or any readings or anything like that that needed to happen and policy that we needed to look over before meetings was supported by our faculty learning and teaching support unit. Yeah so to give a bit of a brief history as to where we've gotten to since then we first implemented this council in sort of November of 2022 even though we sort of started talking about it a lot earlier on April took a lot of time for us to get the terms of reference together and go through all the processes in terms of expression of interest for chairs and members and all that kind of thing. So after we implemented it first met in November we've then since then set up the SAC processes in terms of how we meet within ourselves how we meet with senior leadership and other stakeholders what the communication processes are sort of from us out and from them in and a lot of other things around you know what is it that we'll actually sort of take on and go to you know look into in terms of policy areas you know will we sit on certain faculty committees as a member in addition to the existing student member so that we have sort of visibility and communication within into those committees and sort of a lot of those kind of processes. We also set up a website where we sort of have a bit of information about what the SAC is there's a live all-year live sort of expression of interest form for students to sign up if they you know want to be involved or you know have any ideas things like that. It's also an area that has a submission form for staff to provide any documentation or questions they have and they would like the student advisory council to talk to or provide advice on. The other thing we've done since November is all of our members underwent leadership training and professional development which was something that we felt very strongly about as a necessary thing to ensure that you know we are all volunteers so it's important that there's sort of you know something that you can get out of it rather just being someone who just goes in and you know gives a bunch of stuff and gets nothing really out of return but also ensures that actually they're better members for it. They get practical training on how to you know how to act appropriately in this kind of structure in terms of conversion and diversion thinking or in terms of you know how to how to be how to represent you know not just your views but sort of the views of all of your student cohort or how to you know communicate more effectively in a professional sense all those kind of things and they were very valuable opportunities for our members. So from those same training sessions and other things we spent a while coming up with sort of an overarching mission statement and values in order to ensure that we're all aligned and directed in the same way and so we count with this mission statement about our mission is to amplify the student voice and to advise faculty on strategy to enhance students's university experience and well-being and we also count with three sort of broad values service, buyer and connect and we didn't realize at the time until afterwards that service, buyer, connect also equal SAC which was rather a funny coincidence which we didn't appreciate. So I'm just going to share with you is just a short case study on one of the things that we've been working on this year and this is kind of in this idea of one of the roles of the SAC is to kind of provide feedback and so we have worked with senior leadership in faculty and recently at our university they have released an advancing students in education strategy to work towards quite aspirational for 2030 and it's got a number of you know priority areas and commitment areas in it and so with faculty we were given the opportunity to work through this strategy and then as a student advisory council say well what areas of this strategy are priority from a student perspective and so we identified five top priority areas and then what we did was then we worked through the key commitment areas in a number of kind of different ways of you know voting and putting preferences forward and then we nominated key areas to focus on within those priority areas and so that was given to the faculty's teaching and learning team and they're going to then use those priority areas that have been identified I guess to then align with their how they're going to what activities they're going to do to then start to initiate and implement the university's advancing students in education strategy so that's one example of this providing feedback and then Jonathan is now going to talk to one that's a little bit of a different case example. Yeah so as we sort of said it was two-way street so you know it's sort of providing feedback is then coming to us and then in terms of idea generation us going out our faculty recently has been undertaking a sort of a what they've called the future faculty review but as many of you may know in the process of creating strategic plans and things like that as soon as you sort of put out the first one you're straight on to work into the next one and they usually last about as half a time as as as we sort of say they will. So last year the faculty released their advancing health 2030 strategy and now they're already hard at work looking towards the strategy for 2040 and so that was what this future faculty review was about and so we went into this review with a lot of ideas and and to sort of provide our ideas and to and to give our thoughts on the future of the faculty given that we are the workforce of the future. So what we did is we advocated for a lot of different things but for training students via a lot more realistic assessments and also including a lot of you know sort of breakthrough technology such as chat gpt and sort of other AI and all that kind of stuff and ensuring that you know these kind of things like those and internships and all those kind of things are are brought in to our education system and not sort of shunned but actually actively sort of fostered we teach our students how to use these technologies how to get the most out of these internships and surely everyone has the opportunity to use to have these internships things like that. We also talked a lot about sort of agile systems that permit rapid evaluation and feedback both in terms of students providing sort of feedback to staff but also from ensuring that staff can give better feedback to students quicker and so that students can actually you know take on this feedback and use it effectively rather than having it sort of you know getting feedback for one assignment and then the next three assignments don't actually matter at all about the so the same content of that feedback related to and feedback in assignment one and so it's kind of useless. We also talked a lot about opening pathways for PhD students and PhD graduates as well into clinical training degrees because being a faculty of medicine downstream health sciences this is sort of our bread and butter and a lot of what we do. We also did a lot of work on advocating to faculty for longer term contracts for early career researchers and ensuring that the sort of the casual contracts that graduate researchers are often put on during their candidature for casual teaching and things like that are a lot have a lot better conditions in them and we've made some great strides in that area. So I'm just going to quickly touch on some of our key learnings from this year and last year that we can share with you and I guess the the number one thing is that this advisory council and this co-design project that we've been working on it has a long-term horizon and really that these sort of I guess kind of like projects need to be sustained over a period of time and they can't just be dependent on the students that are volunteering and so they require significant administration support from you know from the faculty to be able to support the students in doing this because students are still students we need to be studying we need to be achieving our own milestones and we can't be you know doing all of the I guess kind of organization around you know paperwork and those sorts of things and preparing meeting minutes and that and so that's been a really good help in terms of us with the student advisory council. The other thing that they need is that they need staff who are going to be invested and believe in the student voice and want to involve students at this level of faculty leadership so the staff really have to have you know you know really put their social capital into and behind these sorts of projects and like I was saying because this is a long-term horizon we have to have mechanisms in place for this to be sustained in the long term a lot of kind of co-design project that we've Jonathan and I have seen and have worked on previously have been short-term horizon and so once you start to get this long-term horizon we've got a significant period of change that we're about to embark upon where Jonathan and our I and our other leadership team are going to then be leaving and then we've got this kind of handover and succession planning process where we need to hand over to a new group of leadership and then also to a new group of members and be able to kind of sustain this trajectory over time and all of that that is quite time-intensive. Jonathan and I and our other leadership group really saw value in this and we were involved in the co-design from the beginning and the next group or iteration will come in at a different period in the co-design process so you know whether or not they will have the same motivations or have the same investment into the student advisor at council as this group has you know that's a bit of uncertainty so it really comes down to as well discussions that we're having with faculty at the moment if we've got these sorts of initiatives how our students recognise for their time whether it be that it's you know remuneration or an honorary position or you know like Jonathan said we're you know engaging in training and those sorts of activities but it is something that's really important and needs to be considered to allow sustainability of these projects. So these are our references and we just have to acknowledge everyone that was involved you know all of our members and also many different key staff who have provided so much support and as Brice said a lot of you know their political capital and social capital in enabling us to be able to exist and to do the work and have the impact that we've already had so thank you very much for listening and we'll take any questions. Yeah thanks for listening everyone. Thank you Bri and Jonathan and at this time I would just like to open it up to any questions you can either turn on your microphone or if you'd like you can type your question in chat while you're typing or thinking of your questions I'd like to start off if I might. First question I love how you involved training and sort of upskilling of your your SAC. How did you decide on the type of training the method of training and whether it would be internal or external? So I mean in terms of sort of how we decided I think those of us who are sort of involved in the whole sort of development of SAC we sort of thought well what is it we feel we need to be able to succeed in this role you know what's been helpful to us that we've already might have received or what is something that we haven't received we feel might be helpful and we've also had conversations with with many staff around what they also felt might be helpful for us to succeed and that sort of gave us the list of what training we wanted in terms of whether it was internal or external we didn't have the internal capacity really at that stage to do that training we sort of had internal capacity for mentoring and things like that but not for actual training so we went externally we since our faculty has hired someone to whose entire job is to do is to be internal and do that training so we've been working really closely with them over the last couple of months since they started to sort of bring them up to speed and really develop a good sort of training program for for the next year's SAC and onwards and and hopefully there'll be a lot more responsive and can really adapt as necessary to the needs and desires of each group um I think the middle one I've forgotten that's all right John could you mind if I just add to that quick I just wanted to also acknowledge that the the faculty and the teaching and learning support unit really wanted to make sure at the beginning that they were there to be able to provide support for us but they didn't want to influence the SAC and so another reason why we went with the external training at the beginning as well was so that we had that external perspective um and since then like Jonathan said we have been able to kind of like figure out what our needs are and we can do more of an internal training process but there was um you know a lot of recognition at the beginning that they didn't the they didn't want to have their employed staff to influence what we were doing what our direction was and what we determined that we what impact that we wanted to have and I think that's really really important um in developing a group like this that has autonomy um to kind of develop up you know what it is that they're going to and what influence they want to have at this level in faculty we have one question in the room as well thank you guys oh sorry sorry I thought that was me someone else go ahead yeah thank you um great presentation you were really thorough on how and the um methods to set up and sustain such a group like you I'm a PhD candidate and student rep I'm interested in knowing how it seems that you set up a very good mechanism for voice and that was taken very seriously to what extent were what you put forward acted on the ideas or the feedback you know how real was this in the at the end of the day I mean I can certainly talk to to some of it um admittedly a lot of our time this year has been spent just establishing the council and creating those mechanisms so we haven't had as much time for more of the strategic work but we sort of felt that it was best to set up the foundations this year so that then future generations within the student advisory council can do and focus a lot more on that in terms of the strategic work we have done um as we sort of talked about a little bit in that last um that last case study around idea generation um a lot of the stuff that we advocated for within the um the future faculty review and especially around sort of short term contracts um our faculty is now taking a review to ensure that they are aware of all of the um you know the different types of employment than our faculty and to put in context our faculty is about 60 something percent of the University of Melbourne in terms of both staff and money and um you know we've got like 12 000 students and other sort of 10 000 staff it's a very very very large um faculty so they're um I'm taking quite a serious review around that and also creating funds um to ensure that and new policies to ensure that the default you know employment method going forward is is continuing rather than short term we've also had a lot of impact in terms of um our advocacy around feedback for example um we now have a funded and um you know a policy that's that's being implemented and starting in December around um feedback from staff to students and how to ensure it's it's better more timely and that'll also involve a lot of um work around redesigning assessment redesigning courses to ensure that they are um better for for students and and and have more realistic assessment or that kind of thing and that's just the first part of much larger body of work that we all recognize um now and we're sort of working towards around sort of feedback up from students as well um and a lot of other things around that so that's sort of some of the work I guess we've done and it really has had quite a bit of impact which we're very grateful for and very glad to have. I'm also just going to add to that as well Jonathan if you don't mind just um to in that you know we have had situations so we've had we've had you know that impact and it's been really really amazing and again I believe that it is contingent on the staff leadership at the time and this is where I really want to have structures or mechanisms in place to be able to make sure that you know that you that you can check in and make sure we're tracking along that um and part of our new terms of reference that we've got moving into next year are around the leadership of the SAC having regular meetings with the faculty leadership where we have um you know agended things and and and they have meeting minutes and we're checking in on projects and so we're monitoring you know what actions have been made on those projects over time as well because we have had circumstances too when you know we've put forward some feedback and then that hasn't been acted on um so um you know with different you know you know in a smaller level so I guess that that's a kind of mechanism to be able to make sure that that's tracking along as well in the future I hope that answers your question