HPY306 is a core third-year unit within the psychology undergraduate degree that has been designed to better prepare students for work, or postgraduate study in counselling and psychology. Most students in HPY306 aspire to complete further study to become a psychologist. However, entry into professional psychology courses is competitive and the number of students who secure a place to follow this pathway is proportionately small. Moreover, as indicated in the 2022 Deakin Graduate Outcomes Survey (GOS), full-time employment rates of psychology students who exit after third-year are lower than for some other study areas.

HPY306 has been designed with this in mind, and facilitates students work-readiness by teaching transferable skills but also by exposing students to a variety of models of counselling and psychotherapy, thus enabling exploration of alternative career pathways outside of being a psychologist. The aim is to encourage students to feel more confident to join the workforce, more empowered in their decision-making, more positive about employment options, and to provide clarity around aspirations to pursue further study.  

Students are curious at this stage of their study about what a career looks like as a counsellor or psychologist, and they need to make important decisions about their next steps in their study and career. The student experience, identity development, employment prospects, and work readiness of students upon completion of this unit would be significantly enriched by the inclusion of professional voices, advice, and lived experiences of other professionals who are currently practicing in the field.  

Accordingly, this project will involve students as both influencers and co-creators by creating an opportunity for the student to partner with staff to (a) develop interview questions that summarise the key questions students have for professionals in the field at this important stage of their learning and (b) interview an industry professional who is currently practicing in this field for inclusion as new learning resources for HPY306 students completing this unit in the future. Student partners and staff will work together to co-create unit learning resources (4 x 1-hour videos) summarising the content of the interviews using automatic captioning and transcription to improve equity and inclusion experiences of all students enrolled in this unit. This will enhance student learning by demonstrating the application of unit content in a real-world context. 

Project Aims:

1. To critically review benefits and challenges of group assessment tasks and co-design ways to strengthen benefits and mitigate challenges with students.  
2. To co-design a flexible and inclusive group assessment task for HSN308 with students considering the benefits and challenges identified in Aim 1
3. To co-design the assessment rubric with students that assesses both the group work process and the product. 

This project involves students as ‘co-creators’ of a crucial unit element, which is a new assessment task.  Through four engaging workshops, students and staff will work together to create a meaningful outcome by leveraging their expertise, knowledge, and prior experiences. Students will have opportunities to make decisions and significantly co-contribute as partners to the exploration, planning and design of the project. Student engagement in this process can be multifaceted including, choosing a suitable social nutrition problem for the group assignment topic, creating different case scenarios, writing assignment instructions, articulating and recommending ways to manage group work issues, and reviewing rubric templates and modifying/adding/deleting assessment criterion as required.

In all these activities, students will play an active role as contributors and co-creators, fostering teamwork among the project team (i.e., staff, students, and the Health LI team). As co-creators, students will have the opportunity to develop essential skills such as teamwork, negotiation, written and verbal communication, time management, and adherence to deadlines. Furthermore, engaging in these activities will allow students to reflect on their learning and unit learning outcomes, which will further enhance their learning. Furthermore, this project involves students as ‘Influencers’ and ‘co-researchers’ where they conduct focus groups with their fellow students to gather opinions of a wider group of HSN308 students on group assessments. Staff and students as a group will reflect on these findings and will consider learners’ opinions (i.e., needs and expectations) in designing the group assessment. The Health LI team are experienced in collaborative co-design and involving students in this process.

The current Engineering Course HUB provides students with useful information, but the information is limited to what staff thought would be useful for student consumption. Some of the resources that provide students context and support for example, internship experiences, transition to employment are aging and requires redevelopment. Student co-creation in redeveloping the HUB is critical to ensuring content is relevant and useful for upcoming students.

Project Aims:

• Review current information in the Course HUB and identify a plan / staged approach (including timeframes) for revamping the Course Hub.
• Develop and curate critical course, major and unit related information in collaboration with key stakeholders including Discipline Heads, Course Directors and Associate Heads (T&L) in a format that is appropriate and is relatively easy to maintain.
• Identify, develop and curate information related to key support available for students in the context of an undergraduate engineering course in collaboration with Library, SEBE TET Team, SEBE WIL Team, Language and Learning, Disability Resource Centre, DeakinTalent and other areas of the university, as needed.
• Review and evaluate sample resources with key stakeholders and students in collaboration with the project team to improve visibility, ensure consistency and timeliness of information disseminated via the Course Hub.

First year nutrition students (course codes H315/H318/D301/D333) complete two nutrition and food science units (HSN104 & HSN106). A large portion of the learning activities in these units are practical experiences in laboratories. These laboratory classes can have significant obstacles that make it difficult for some students to attend, engage and succeed, leading to inequities in the student cohorts. Such obstacles include mobility issues, anxieties around being in a laboratory for the first time, access for regional students (especially for Geelong nutrition students), and cultural differences around handling and consuming food. Student eVALUate data suggests they understand the value of these experiences but attendance rates are poor, particularly since post-COVID return to campus activities. 

This project intends to involve students as partners to identify pressure points of the laboratory learning activities, and design and develop resources to alleviate their concerns and have a better laboratory experience. The outcomes from this project will benefit all students including those with DRC Access Plans, as well as teaching and sessional staff. In addition, the outcomes from this project may be applied to other units with laboratory learning activities in 2nd and 3rd years of the nutrition undergraduate degrees, and perhaps other courses as well.

Project Aims:

• Identify obstacles that impede students (with a focus on regional students and students with disabilities) from attending, engaging, and succeeding in the practical learning activities in HSN104 and HSN106. 
• Design and develop resources to support the teaching and learning of students in the practical learning activities in HSN104 and HSN106 (e.g., introductory video to “tour” the laboratory space).  

This project is a continuation of the undergraduate Health and Physical Education program’s commitment to ‘Students as Partners’ and assessment in higher education. It seeks to emphasise the unique dual expertise of our students—both as learners within the program and as future educators—to collaborate with staff partners in leading a whole-of-class approach to co-designing a rubric for an assessment task embedded in EEH455.

The project recognizes students as co-creators in their educational journey, acknowledging their insights into their learning experiences and their knowledge of assessment theories and practices. Building upon a prior ‘Students as Partners’ initiative, this project aims to deepen engagement by moving from selected student involvement (only the student partners were involved in the assessment rubric co-design) to a whole-class co-design approach. This will enable a more comprehensive collection of perspectives, ensuring that the learning activities and outcomes are closely aligned with the students’ needs and the educational objectives of the program. 

The relevance of this partnership to the project’s success cannot be overstated. Students’ dual perspectives as learners and future educators are critical in shaping an assessment tool that is both academically robust and attuned to the learner’s experience. This ensures that the rubric is not only a reflection of theoretical best practices but also of the practical, evolving needs of the student body.

Project Aims: 

• Co-create an assessment rubric which aligns with the unit ULOs and DGLOs.
• Enhance the collaborative relationship between the staff and student body through the students-as-partners process.
• Improve authentic assessment practices using student voice.
• Support and empower pre-service teachers in providing ownership to them over their own learning

With Campus Reactivation at the forefront of 2024, as well as the opening of our GIFT campus, it is important that we understand the student experience and requirements of on campus learning, and how this coexists with our digital environment.  

Previously, post-pandemic learning spaces were described as online or on-campus modalities, synchronous or asynchronous formats, yet the return to campus post-lockdowns heralds redefined learning spaces. Students, in this juncture, are navigating a physical and digital realm where they are always connected. Through recent surveys of our learning spaces, we have found students yearn for authentic and inclusive learning experiences attuned to their multifaceted needs. Therefore, there is a need for learning spaces to support this reformed duality of presence with spaces that accommodate individual strengths and elements of inclusion to empower students throughout their academic journey. 

The aim of this project is with students as cocreators to develop recommendations for: 

1. How learning spaces can be flexible in response to contemporary requirements of learners.
2. How learning spaces at Deakin can create connected environments that bring together physical and virtual spaces to support the students learning journey post pandemic. 
3. How we describe learning spaces that can support students learning journey 

Despite the title, The Assessment Circle is not a formally assessed task rather an opportunity for Pre-Service Teachers (PST) to “present and discuss evidence of their progress towards achieving the Graduate level of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) (AITSL, 2011)” (Toe et al., 2020). A traditional Assessment Circle is facilitated by the Site Director to support the PSTs in setting goals around one or more of the APSTs, collecting artefacts and then presenting evidence at a formal professional discussion with peers, academic staff and members of the staff in Alliance schools (such as Mentor Teachers and school leadership). 

The student and staff partners will co-create a set of scaffolded recommendations for Assessment Circle design across 2nd, 3rd and 4th year placements. The student partners’ expertise is grounded in their lived experience of participating in Assessment Circles as part of their professional placement in schools throughout their Initial Teacher Education program. Together with staff partners, this project will identify opportunities for improving the design of the Assessment Circles to better suit the diverse learning needs of students. 

Project Aims

• To co-create a set of recommendations for Assessment Circle design, which aims to provide meaningful and practical support for our PSTs in reflecting on their developing teaching practice, as it aligns with the AITSL Graduate standards and their existing coursework. 
• To co-create a set of scaffolded documents/templates used across, 2nd, 3rd and 4th year BEd and BHPE practicums, to support student reflection on their placement experience through assessment circles, which builds PSTs capacity towards the completion of the DTPA in 4th year. 
• To better understand the needs of equity students (regional and low SES) while on teaching placement in regional schools, to support their potential for future employment. 

The project aims to co-create authentic, interactive and engaging learning activities, that students can complete using household items or the environment around them, to enhance their learning of threshold concept in Engineering Mechanics. Using household and surrounding environment day-to-day items to conduct mini-experiments, based on a diverse student cohort’s ideas and feedback will allow us to develop learning activities that are inclusive if different learning styles and equity student needs, including that of remote learners. 

Efforts towards identifying the reasons behind high fail rates in Engineering Mechanics units have been reported widely and several recommendations have ensued as a result​. Some statistically significant improvements have been observed by focusing on specific teaching approaches, such as interactive computer-based or approaches that promote active learning and engagement of students’ interest. The most predominant consensus is that traditional teaching methods in engineering are not conducive to effective learning of mechanics principles and that a variety of approaches is need.  

Studies have also shown that success potential in these units, depends heavily on the students deep understanding of key concepts or threshold concepts learned at early stages and that students’ and educators’ perspectives on these ‘threshold concepts’ can be significantly different. Current understanding of the causes for high fail rates in this discipline and the effect of different teaching approaches suggests that greater co-ownership of curriculum is required, a greater range of teaching approaches may be needed for introductory engineering mechanics, and that educators should direct their efforts towards the threshold concepts which are considered the most troublesome by the students specifically. 

This project aims to improve low student performance rates within the core discipline Engineering Mechanics units in the Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering and the Bachelor in Civil Engineering units, by: 

• Identifying visual and tactical experiences in students’ typical routine and daily activities that are practical examples/demonstrations of engineering mechanics and strength of materials theory/fundamentals.  
  
• Diversifying and increasing learning activities to enhance student learning of transformative threshold concepts in Engineering Mechanics, that are inclusive and accessible to different student cohorts, including remote learners, from regional Australia and low SES backgrounds.
• Providing accessible and inclusive hands-on learning activities (mini-experiments) that students can conduct at home using typical household items and surrounding environment.
• Designing and developing active-learning based experiential learning activities that allow students to enhance their learning and retain knowledge of transformative concepts in Engineering Mechanics. 

Working alongside Student Partners, this project seeks to explore consistencies and incongruities
between unit design and student’s experiences undertaking core units in the Bachelor of
Education (Primary). It will also co-create a framework and set of principles to promote alignment
between unit design (informed by Handbook entries) and actual student experience (as
described by pre-service teacher’s (PST) through survey and focus group responses).

This project is led by a desire to establish responsive teaching and learning pedagogies
throughout our Initial Teacher Education (ITE) program, and to support and strengthen the
student experience to ensure confident, prepared, classroom ready graduates.

In partnering with students, staff hope to learn through their lived experiences. Academics see shifting landscapes for our students and seek to gain an authentic understanding of
the students’ perceptions of unit experiences throughout their first two years of study in the
Bachelor of Education (Primary), an integral period in a PST’s development. Previous research (El Hachem, Hyde et al, 2023) has suggested that when there is incongruence between unit intent and student experience, a PSTs overall University engagement and perception of preparedness at graduation is impacted. Drawing upon Student Partner expertise, this project hope to maximise students experience in the course.

In order to understand the perceptions and experiences of students’ learning and
preparation for teaching course and explore consistencies and incongruities between unit
design and actual student experience we will support our Student Partners to design and
conduct a survey followed by the preparation for and facilitation of a series of focus groups
involving Bachelor of Education (Primary) 3rd and 4th year students as participants reflecting
on their prior experiences completing 1st and 2nd year units. 

Project Aims:

1. Understand the perceptions and experiences of students’ learning and preparation
   for teaching in the core units in the first and second year of the Bachelor of
   Education (Primary) course
2. Explore consistencies and incongruities between unit design and actual student
   experience in the Bachelor of Education (Primary).
3. Co-design a framework and set of principles to guide unit development in the first
   and second year of the Bachelor of Education (Primary)
4. Scaffold students’ capabilities in advocacy and leadership, curriculum and pedagogy
   design, and research
5. Provide recommendations for the implementation/application of the new
   framework and set of principles through the Bachelor of Education (Primary) MCR
   (Major Course Review) and Stage 2 VIT (Victorian Institute of Teaching) Course
   Accreditation in 2025

This project will work with student partners to develop career-oriented digital resources for HSN309 – Food Policy and Regulation, a level-3 core online unit within the Bachelor of Nutrition Science. Recent student eVALUate data has highlighted that students may not be making connections between the unit content and their future careers in nutrition.

Student partners will explore these perceptions and with staff co-design and build curriculum resources to strengthen the links between content and career relevance. The project is based on core components: (i) student partners engaging with the broader HSN309 student cohort to gauge student understanding of the importance of food policy and regulation for their future careers, and strategies to develop this understanding; and (ii) student partners working together with staff to scope, design and conduct a series of interviews with nutrition professionals and other stakeholders to illuminate connections with food policy and regulation in the work context. The interviews will form the basis for online curriculum resources for future iterations of HSN309. This project is an important element within the continuous improvement of teaching and learning resources and student experiences within HSN309 and the Bachelor of Nutrition Science. 

Project Aims:

1. Explore student perceptions about the relevance of food policy and regulation across a variety of nutrition career pathways
2. Co-create strategies for developing student knowledge about the relevance of food policy and regulation for their future careers
3. Scope, co-design and conduct a series of interviews with nutrition professionals and other stakeholders identified by the team to inform the development of curriculum resources (e.g., video interviews) 
4. Build student awareness of career pathways that support food and nutrition outcomes for people from regional and remote Australia, people from low socio-economic status backgrounds and Indigenous persons
5. Provide opportunities for students from regional and remote Australia, from low socio-economic status backgrounds and Indigenous students to engage in paid employment within the nutrition field.  

Mathematical skills are essential for nurses and midwives to be able to perform their roles safely and provide quality care to patients and women. These skills are vitally important in the execution of accurate calculations when determining medication preparation and administration. Recent research demonstrates that medication administration errors within Australian health care settings continue to be significant. It has been hypothesised that these errors are often compounded by clinicians experiencing maths anxiety (Williams and Davis, 2016).  McKenna and colleagues (2022) highlight that while proficiency in performing mathematical calculations as they relate to medication administration is an integral component of health professionals’ education, they acknowledge that maths anxiety may hinder students’ capability and confidence in this area. It is also recognised that there is scant research focused on nursing or midwifery students’ experience of maths anxiety, and how this may adversely impact on patients’ safety. 

This project will provide an avenue for the student voice in terms of sharing their experiences and perceptions in relation to their confidence around maths, their experience of engaging with maths as it relates to the successful completion of their course requirements, and opportunities within the course where students believe more maths content would be supportive and beneficial. These perceptions will provide the project team with invaluable insights into what some of the key areas of concern are for the students, and how we may best support their learning and understanding in these areas. Students arrive into our Bachelor of Nursing/Midwifery programs with no requirements to have previously studied mathematics. Our project will aim to identify if our curriculum assumes a certain standard of numeracy that may be an unrealistic expectation for some of our students. This insight will provide us with the knowledge to create interventions to bridge this gap, and support students to gain mathematical confidence and competence. 

Project Aims:

1. Successful collaboration and partnership between the project team academics and student partners.
2. Designing a student-friendly project format whereby nursing and midwifery students feel supported and welcomed to share their maths experiences and perspectives.
3. Determining where students believe there are opportunities for more maths content to be integrated into the curriculum.
4. Determining if nursing and midwifery students experience maths anxiety, and whether some students experience this more than others.
5. Evaluating established maths-support resources for their appropriateness at meeting nursing and midwifery students’ voiced needs.