Using data to enhance the student experience
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One of the biggest challenges in Higher Education currently is how to enhance and support the student experience and student journey. Educational institutions have the facilities for student services and other initiatives to support students, such as student unions, which support their fellow students’ journey, providing access to societies, events, academic representation, and much more. All initiatives are there to support the student experience and journey, but it can be difficult to get an overview of the student trends and needs, which is essential for implementing improvements that benefit the students.
When asking almost any educational institution, they will agree that they are over surveying their students and they have plenty of data. This makes us wonder, what is the difference between collecting/storing student data and using student data?
Let’s try to break it down into two different sections.
As an educational institution, you are initiating your own data collection and research on your students. This is often done by using surveys or questionnaires to understand their feedback on a specific topic/course or event. Or in short, it would be an evaluation survey/questionnaire.
Additionally, an educational institution is often subject to use national student surveys and questionnaires. These surveys are often a long list of questions about the general experience of the education from the student's perspective. It is commonly used at the end of an academic year or course/semester. These surveys generate huge amounts of information and data, which often takes 3-6 months to break down into a report and then shared with the educational institution. This gives a detailed overview of the student experience, but it does not give the expected outcome for the students. We often see the 3 following problems occur in this method.
Problem 1: Problems that existed several months ago may no longer be problems, and solutions that existed several months ago may similarly no longer offer value. Dedicating your resources to outdated problems is extremely ineffective.
Problem 2: Only measuring the student sentiment at particular times of the year may cause bias. In our example, as most universities collect data near the summer, problems may not come across as strongly as students are happy that their summer vacation is approaching. Collecting data in the spring or fall may reflect entirely different perceptions.
Problem 3: Asking students to provide their feedback but not addressing the problem (in time), may only result in more negative feedback.
So what happens with the data collected? Is it used internally, both on faculty, management, and student level?
Let’s test this assumption a bit more thoroughly.
42%, of our customers and does answering our research survey, thinks it is difficult to act on their current data, despite having relevant insight. What we currently see on surveying students, is frustration and bad results. The institutions thinks they are over surveying their students, and the students are not seeing a need to give their feedback, if they are no future sight of improvement.
The new generation of students are a fast and responsive group of students, and they are used to fast and responsive systems and solutions. Waiting weeks or even months for reports with results about student engagement, student satisfaction and student expectations is simply not enough anymore.
There is several EdTech companies that specialises in breaking down student data for educational institutions. At StudentPulse, we have a student feedback system, that can be used to both collect the student feedback, and to give real-time insights in the areas that needs to be improved. Other EdTech’s have other solutions or system, but the point is that there is solutions to the slow and traditional way of handling student feedback.
Finally, just try to imagine that you had an automatic system that sends out tailormade surveys to your students Monday morning, and after a few hours of students answering the survey, you would be able to get a full overview of your students experience of the current phase of education? Imagine all the possibilities it would give you as an institution, teacher, quality representative or Students’ Union. Depending on which issues that needs to be addressed, and how comprehensive they are to fix, it would be possible to identity areas of improvement, and to fix potential problems within 1-4 weeks. That is what we like to call a dynamic feedback system that addresses a dynamic generation of students.
Want to learn more about this? Feel free to reach out to our team, and we will be happy to share more information about our experience with this and show you how some of partner Universities are succeeding with using data.
