Published 2 December 2021
Professional and academic staff can now receive support in planning and facilitating student focus groups, with Arc and UNSW Student Engagement Team joining forces to launch a central Student Focus Group Program.
The new central Student Focus Group program will ensure that staff can seamlessly integrate the students as partners methodology in future decision making, program review and strategy development, in an interactive and engaging way.
“The Student Life team partners with Arc on many initiatives and this is another example of the great work our two teams do together in order to create meaningful partner programs with students. In this program, students receive training on ‘how to deliver constructive feedback’ as part of their involvement and with their participation contributing towards an AHEGs accreditation” commented Natalie Nickson, Head of Student Life at UNSW Sydney.
The new program will see Arc and UNSW Student Engagement partner with University stakeholders to design and facilitate focus groups that draw upon best practice principals; ensuring the student experience is interactive and engaging, and that projects receive the diverse and meaningful impact from students to ensure that all initiatives take into account the student perspective.
“At Arc, we know the importance of having the student voice at the heart of everything we do. One of our core values is ‘put students first’ which entails enabling students to use their voice to influence and affect positive change within their community. We look forward to working with the Student Engagement Team in facilitating opportunities for students to provide rich insights to help champion the student experience” said Shelley Valentine, CEO of Arc.
The focus groups run as part of the program will be facilitated by UNSW Student Engagement and University Partners will receive a full insights report with detailed intel on the qualitative data from the sessions.