The winning ideas on how the Student Success Strategic Framework can be improved and how we can better align our day-to-day activities to student success have been revealed.

At the “Student Success @MQ all staff Town Hall we asked staff to tell us, “How their day-to-day activities could be aligned with the approach outlined in the Student Success Strategic Framework?”

Thank you to everyone who contributed their ideas and thoughts. Around 40 staff members took the time to provide valuable feedback on how the framework can be improved and how we can better align our day-to-day activities to student success. Some fabulous entries came through – we clearly have many dedicated, student-focused staff members at Macquarie, so the judging was tough.  However, working through the entries with a number of students who provided a solid ‘reality check’, we now have our winners!

Congratulations to Gemma Bennett and Melinda Chadwick who will share the top prize, as well as runners-up Ying Xiao, Sonal Singh, Clare Hurst and Eric Daro.

Check out their ideas below:

Winner	Prize	Idea
Gemma Bennett – Team Leader, Student Connect.	$250	Keeping staff informed! At Students Connect we achieve this through the regular updates published in our MUSEletter and Student Connect Notebook. They incorporate all the information that employees at Students Connect need to succeed and deliver accurate and timely service to students. I would suggest developing a university-wide platform – a knowledge base/one source of truth – that would keep us all (professional and academic staff) informed and connected. I believe staff would feel more engaged, informed and confident in the information they were delivering to individual students.
Melinda Chadwick – Team Leader, Campus Engagement.	$250	We can gather student feedback on a regular basis, to drive change based on students’ needs. On L3 (MAZE), we have large whiteboards that we use to gather opinions and ideas from students and then transform this feedback into real-time improvements to what we do. Through the Post-it Note process, we can capture the sentiment of our students, and take these ideas to the next level by categorising the feedback and working through the ideas in order to make the most of quick wins, and champion change when it’s outside our scope and resources. Most importantly we have to close the feedback loop and communicate back to students about the changes that their feedback has generated. This feedback strategy can be implemented throughout all service centres, during big university events and even in the classroom environment. Through this, we can show that we value our current students, that we constantly improve and we listen and respond to their needs.
Ping Xiao – PACE Systems Support Officer, PACE.	$100	Create an Alumni mentoring program. The benefits are: – A way for alumni to give back to the University, – A way to create opportunities for students’ personal and professional development through the support of the Alumni.
Sonal Singh – Widening Participation Planning Manager, Widening Participation.	$100	#myMQ – Develop a mobile app. It will have a 3D Model of Macquarie campus that students can use to find services/units/faculties on campus including events and workshops for students. Students can collect badges, and this could be part of the orientation activity and support transition into the University and facilitate communication with students.
Clare Hurst – Career Development Consultant FBE, Career and Employment Services.	$100	Establishing a Career Peer network whereby we intensively train a group of students who can then act as coaches to provide advice and support to other students needing career assistance. This meaningful partnership between students, as well as Career and Employment Staff, would lead to opportunities for career success for both the Career Peers and the students. This focus on students will help them develop a deep understanding of their peer’s aspirations, needs and challenges.
Eric Daro – Director, Individual Giving and Alumni, Office of Advancement.	$100	As students undertake PACE placements at various companies, the Alumni Office can proactively identify and engage alumni working at those companies to serve as mentors and guides to students throughout their PACE internship. This approach can be built into the program requirement as we engage companies with PACE, where possible. This would make our students feel they have a supportive community of alumni and allow our alumni to play an important role in supporting their alma mater and our students. It would also make Macquarie stand out as a university that is truly a community and raise the University’s profile to others working at those companies.

We would like to thank and congratulate all staff who took the time to engage in the feedback process, particularly at such a busy time of year. All the ideas provided are valuable and will be used to further enhance the framework and inform future work we do in student success space.

The next step is to integrate staff feedback into the green paper and deliver an improved framework to the MQ community by March 2019 so stay tuned!

For now, we wish you all a happy and safe festive season and thank you all for your cooperation and enthusiasm in 2018. More to come in 2019.