UNE’s Learning and Teaching Transformation staff has returned from a very successful Students, Transitions, Achievement, Retention & Success (STARS) conference held in New Zealand last week. The team presented four papers and two posters to 600+ academic and professional staff from universities across Australia and New Zealand.

Julie Godwin and Kylie Day both received awards for ‘Best Poster’ for their presentations regarding the ‘Students as Partners’ project and the ‘Online Supervised Exams’ project.  Trish Donald provided the graphic design for both posters.

Julie’s poster chronicled her work during the first few weeks in a newly created position at UNE, namely Manager Student Partnerships. The poster focused on seeking a way for students to locate themselves in their own narrative of teaching and learning and used a ‘students as partners’ framework, with contemporary learning relationships conceptualised through four themes: co- construction, decision making, leadership and cognitive apprenticeship.

The team received positive feedback  from delegates and judges on the scholarly approach, the unpacking of complex ideas, practical application of the themes and the overall design of the poster. Design credit goes to Trish Donald who brilliantly captured the somewhat messy process of framing what students as partners might look like at UNE.

UNE staff and students also featured in papers and emerging initiative presentations and on plenary panels which attracted much interest from the audience.

It is the first time prizes have been awarded to Poster Presentations at the STARS conference as an acknowledgement of the high quality of work submitted this year.

The STARS conference (http://unistars.org/) focus on current research, good practice, emerging initiatives and leading edge ideas that are aimed at enhancing students’ tertiary learning experiences, and UNE’s projects received a high level of interest, with one comment that they ‘sit well on the future of higher education.