Some of what makes university hard is the subject. Some of it is not: a recording that was never made, feedback that arrives after the next assignment, a tutorial scheduled against the shift you work. Those are barriers, and they fall unevenly - the same course can be workable for one student and quietly impossible for another.

This Living Lab starts from the evidence rather than from your own experience. The Student Experience Survey, the research published by the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success, and the Universities Accord all say more about which barriers matter than one student could guess. Preparation links all three.

The work is then narrow: take one barrier the evidence says is real, find out how it shows up here, and test a change with the staff who own it.

You will learn to work from national evidence down to one course, which is the move most reports never make. You will also see what a convenor can change within a semester, what is locked by a program rule, and where the good intentions in a policy stop being felt by students. Most students only ever experience teaching. Far fewer learn how to change it.

Read before you interview anyone:

• QILT runs the Student Experience Survey, the largest survey of current students in Australia, and publishes results by institution.
• The Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success is the national what-works centre for student equity; its trials registry often shows your idea has been tested already.
• The Universities Accord final report names the students the system loses.

Then find the staff partner who owns what you want to change. One meeting tells you whether it is fixable, already being fixed, or decided well above them.

Agreed with your staff partner and set out in your Course Pathway Plan: the barrier and the published evidence that it is real, the change you are trialling in one course or cohort, and a before and after you can measure.

Then a short handover: what you tried, what shifted, and what a School would have to do to run it more widely.

Recommended to students who would rather test whether a barrier is real than assume it, and who can hold the difference between a badly designed system and a person doing their best inside it. No particular discipline is required.

Three cautions. Evidence about students is personal: keep it anonymous, agree in advance what gets reported, and ask your partner in week 1 whether the project needs ethics approval. This is not a complaints process. And one course changed and measured is a result, while a report on assessment across ANU is not.