I recently went up to Glasgow for the annual RAISE Student Voice Conference, a conference dedicated to student engagement attended by both students and university staff passionate about improving the student experience.
I really enjoy working in the higher education sector. The more I can help universities get actionable insight from their student engagement analytics, the more they can identify students that need support and help them get the degree they set out to achieve.
At Ometis we work with university customers on student retention. I relished hearing directly from student engagement leaders about how universities are interacting with students and ideas for improvement.
It was great to hear from so many different perspectives. Some key themes emerged from the days:
Here closing the feedback loop is demonstrating when things are done following analysis of data and the insight that comes out of it.
In quite a few of the talks, the idea came up that both students and staff at universities can sometimes feel like surveys and other data collection exercises are just "box ticking" exercises. They don't necessarily understand or see where this data is then used.
Universities collect so much data across so many different areas. It can be hard to distinguish what is useful and what isn't, especially if a student or staff member doesn't see anything further from this.
There are dashboards, survey results, student record systems, VLE statistics, attendance monitoring KPIs and more. It's a bit of a minefield for both students and staff to understand what they should be looking at and what it all means.
When trying to measure engagement of students, all of this gets taken into account. But if they don't see any action taken from the insight contained in all of this data, it's understandable that they disengage with surveys or don't pay attention to the various dashboards or other data they're given to consume.
One way to tackle this is when the data is being collected or displayed to both students and staff, the reason for this should be given. When action is taken from it, it should be made clear the source of this all.
That way if students can see we did X from the Y survey data we received, it gives meaning and value to all of this data collection.
Given the financial pressures facing the UK higher education sector, international students are a vital source of funding, given they pay more in fees. However, this then produces its own challenges.
It can take a lot more to keep an international student engaged, given:
What came out of RAISE is that a lot of universities are making special efforts to gain a deeper understanding of their international student communities and providing the extra support they needed to, which was great to see.
By demonstrating this understanding and creating spaces for minority groups to bring ideas to the table, ideas could be captured, and then action could be taken.
Again by closing the loop and talking about what worked and the results from it, this was clearly improving engagement for international students.
Another recurring theme across many of the talks was bringing students and staff together to co-design what would work for that specific university.
By creating working groups that were perceived as safe spaces for honest feedback, as well as students leading data collection seemed to really improve engagement in surveys.
A heartfelt talk by the Head of the Student Union at University of Glasgow really brought this into reality. He shared some excellent things that the University of Glasgow had done to improve engagement, and suggested some great ideas.
These included analysing comments on social media, or reviewing student forums for key themes of comments, could go even further.
It showed that universities are really trying hard to bring students and staff together to share ideas and capture key feedback that could improve the university experience.
Again though, the idea that these things need to be acted on quickly and shouted about from the rooftops that they'd been done by bringing staff and students together to close the feedback loop were key to ensuring more students take part in these activities.
It was a great few days learning more about how universities are working to adapt digitally to the post-COVID education era. Students are digital natives that are very happy to engage with digital tools.
But in reality, if they don't see any actions taken from the engagements they have, they will quickly be turned off giving their opinions and feedback.
Without the qualitative feedback from students, which can then be combined with all the data universities collect, it's harder for them to improve student engagement.
Struggling with the same data challenges discussed at RAISE? We help universities connect VLE data, attendance monitoring and survey results into Qlik, Power BI and Inphinity dashboards that make it easier to spot students who need support. Learn more about our HE data solutions here.
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