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This volume Student Support Services: Exploring impact on student engagement, experience and learning, covers a wide and diverse range of higher education contexts to explore the current state and the future of student support services. The central focus for all the chapters is about what, why and how to achieve student success within an intricate and complex web of learning ecologies, often invisible to the naked eye but interconnected within and between each other. This has profound impacts on students, often characterised by an ongoing tension between students as learners and students as consumers. With over 40 chapters, the book is divided into two sections. Part 1 is a conceptual section, which explores a multitude of worldviews about the ways in which student support services have impacted and may impact on student engagement, experience and learning. This includes discussions about the tensions and opportunities that arise from the curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular conceptualisations of students support services. The discussions come from the vantage point of different ecologies within and between universities and student support services’ impacts, both intentional and accidental, on the development of students, their transformation as learners and as contributing members of the workforce. For example, this covers disruptive technologies and online approaches, university mission and purpose, worldviews and paradigms held by student support and services units, motivation, student retention, and sense of belonging. Part 2 is a practice-based section with reflections and case studies, again from a wide variety of different higher education contexts. This section dives into the how – approaches, solutions, processes – deployed by universities to respond to their identified and often contextualised student support and services challenges. This section provides a rich library of possible ideas that readers can reimagine to manage and/or solve their st

This chapter uses reflective practice and narrative inquiry (Bold, 2012; Clandinin, 2007) to explore the intercultural and multicultural characteristics of the Postgraduate Research (PGR) Development Programme at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, a Sino-British transnational university in China. As part of a multimethods qualitative approach, this chapter reports on in-depth individual and group interviews that were used to explore a diverse range of voices, including Doctoral researchers, who are also teaching assistants, and PhD supervisors, as well as critical reflections of the educational developers (the authors) on the intercultural design of the PGR Programme. Our findings show that the PGR Programme has considerable benefits in a transnational context where intercultural communication is an inherent and important part of ultimate success for PhD candidates, and intercultural communication skills development is a key part of what the PGR Programme offers. This study provides useful insights for academics and program designers in China, and beyond, when constructing a similar program in their own context.

This chapter describes the Humans of QUT project, a staff-facilitated and student-led Facebook page that regularly publishes biographical stories of local characters from an Australian university. It presents the project as a case study of a networked narrative approach to supporting student engagement with the university community and describes the outcomes of the project for student volunteer leaders, support staff, interviewees, and users of the webpage. The theoretical construct of networked narratives is used as a basis for considering the depth of stakeholder relatedness and the breadth of networked connections. The case study suggests that student leaders valued the sharing of student insights, while analysis of the Humans of QUT Facebook data indicates that user engagement is 5000% higher than average Higher Education Facebook pages. The results indicate that effective student support services can emerge when students are encouraged to support one another using the tools with which they are most familiar.

Increasing demand for STEM graduates and a competitive higher education sector have highlighted a critical need to safeguard the learner experience through the provision of accessible and curriculum-aligned support for learning. The anticipated and actual demand for STEM skills is underscored by the requirement for universities to ensure a sustainable pipeline of skilled, confident and job-ready graduates. However, when the focus is on the end-product (graduate employability), what then is the place and value in the learner experience of the “hard” skills, that is mastery of the discipline? A competitive higher education market, in conjunction with the widening participation agenda, has seen an increase in the number of students embarking on degrees in traditional STEM areas, as well as those where STEM concepts underpin their confidence within the discipline (e.g., Nursing, Education). Simultaneously, the move from prerequisites to assumed knowledge requirements for university courses has resulted in students being frequently underprepared for these courses. On this basis, it is essential that universities provide integrated and accessible support for all learners. In this chapter we outline Queensland University of Technology’s response to this issue. We discuss relevant contextual factors that have informed the iterative design and implementation of an institution-wide approach to support learning in STEM disciplines. This approach is grounded in the provision of curriculum-aligned, scaffolded support for learning delivered by STEM discipline experts in the co-curricular space.

This book chapter provides an overview of the support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander higher degree by research (HDR) students at one Australian university as a case study. The hiring of an Indigenous postgraduate program officer (IPPO) was informed by capability building workshops offered to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander HDR students through the National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network (NIRAKN). Presented in this book chapter is the support requested by the HDR students and an overview of the IPPO’s role in supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander HDR students.

This is the overall introduction to the volume, in which we outline the rationale behind the volume and its conceptualization. It poses the central question that was part of the initial call for chapters: are students customers of higher education, or are they learning in higher education? The authors of the more than 40 chapters in this volume all address this question to varying degrees. In this introduction we draw on our previous work in that we conceptualize learning as part of an overall ecology for learning. This is attractive in a book about student support services as it allows us to map such services into an ecology for learning, thereby focusing on the wide range of elements involved, and thus the role of student support services in an overall ecology for learning. We argue here that student support services are a crucial element in this ecology for learning and the more than 40 chapters in this book together reinforce their importance, albeit from a range of different angles.