HEPI/HEA Student Experience Survey

Posted on May 27, 2014 by mikehamlyn

This year’s HEPI/HEA Student experience Survey has been published, and can be downloaded from here.

The key outcomes highlighted are:

Full-time undergraduate students in UK universities express high levels of satisfaction with their courses: 86% are fairly or very satis?ed with their course
While 50% of students experiencing classes of between 1 and 5 other students
?nd them ‘a lot’ bene?cial, the ?gure is only 10% for those with classes of more than 100 students. On average ?rst years have 3.0 of their weekly contact hours in classes of over 100.
Undergraduate students in their ?rst and second years have an average of 14.2 contact hours per week during term time and complete another 14.3 hours of private study on top
Those with between 0 and 9 contact hours are notably less satis?ed than those with between 20 and 29 contact hours
More than four out of ten full-time undergraduate students (44%) think they are receiving very good or good value for money, compared with one-quarter (25%) who consider they are receiving very poor or poor value for money
When asked about their top three priorities for institutional expenditure, 48% of undergraduates chose ‘reducing fee levels’
However, four further clear priorities emerge, each chosen by over one-third of students:
• more teaching hours (35%);
• smaller class sizes (35%);
• better training for lecturers (34%); and
• better learning facilities (34%)

Digging further into the report, then differences appear based on which mission group universities are aligned to, and also by subject discipline.

I was particularly interested in some of the information presented around contact hours, and specifically why students chose not to attend sessions (bearing in mind the current narrative of students as customers who are paying up to £9000 a year where one might expect 100% attendance).

Students wanted more contact hours, yet many times don’t attend for the following reasons:

Looking at the top two reasons for failure to attend raises questions –

How do we make the classes more relevant and unmissable?
Does putting notes online reduce the need to attend a lecture?

With regard to having notes or slides online – this can only be a good thing for those students who genuinely miss a class, or who want to read in advance of attending class. Online learning materials should be more than just the lecture handouts.

On student workload, it’s notable that many students appear to be engaging with fewer learning hours than is expected by QAA. As a possible way to remedy this, do we really think enough about what self directed study entails? Are we, certainly for level 4 students, providing enough guidance on what they should be studying, reading, engaging with, outside of the scheduled time in class? Can we make a very simple change of spelling this out in module handbooks and guides to ensure our students learn in the way that we would like them to and that we manage their expectations of how much work they should be doing?

Not surprisingly, under expectations of value for money, students are less satisfied with what they feel they are receiving.

When asked what their spending priorities would be, students replied as:

As identified in the report, after fees the priorities are: “increasing teaching hours: decreasing class sizes; better training for lecturers; and better learning facilities (as
distinct from better buildings, which is not ranked so highly). It is notable that the higher ranked areas relate to improving the quality of teaching and learning and the lower ranked areas relate more to extra-curricular and environmental issues such as sports facilities and better security on campus. Giving academics more time for research was not ranked highly despite the promotion of ‘research-led teaching’ in many institutions.”

I think there are some interesting areas for further discussion here, with implications for different constituencies:

For the university:

How do we make sure we deliver the right kind of learning in small groups?
Can we manage expectations of workload better?
How do we provide a focus on student experience?
How do we explore the reason students don’t attend ?(do we know if they are not attending?)
What could we do to make class sessions unmissable?
Can we square the circle of providing more smaller classes, with greater contact hours with better qualified lecturers?
How do we improve our online materials?

For senior staff:

how do we respond to the challenges on spending priorities?
How do we lobby the next government on student and university financing?

Times Higher Student Experience Survey

Posted on May 15, 2014 by mikehamlyn

Another day, another league table. This time it’s the Times Higher Education Student Experience Survey.

Rather than the large sample used in National Student Survey, this survey is based on a focus group of students recruited through UCAS, who were questioned in 2012-13. For this university the sample size was 116.

The article alongside the data states:

All respondents were members of YouthSight’s student panel – who are recruited via Ucas – and their views were gathered between October 2012 and June 2013.

The Times Higher Education Student Experience Survey is broken down into 21 attributes of universities, chosen by students as key indicators. Participants were asked to rate how their university performed in each of the areas using a seven-point scale. Each attribute was assigned a weight reflecting its importance within the overall student experience.

The same wording and weighting methodology have been used for the past five years, with the greatest weight applied to the attributes that correlated most to whether or not the respondent would recommend the university to a friend.

Only universities achieving 50 or more ratings have been included in the final dataset, and each university’s score was indexed on a scale from one to 100. A total of 111 institutions (102 last year) met the minimum sample threshold required based on respondents from a total of 14,300 respondents.

The difference in scores of similarly ranked institutions will not be statistically significant. When results are based on a sample of 100, we have to accept some imprecision to arise from sampling variability. But that does not mean to say that these results are without meaning. In this context, the relatively high level of consistency in our data from year to year is reassuring. For example, in each of the past four years, the universities of Sheffield, East Anglia, Dundee, Oxford, Cambridge and Leeds have all featured in the top 10 – this consistency demonstrates the impacts of best practice as opposed to sample variability.

So of the universities that showed significant rises or consistent high rankings – what do they suggest is the reason?

Sheffield – academic skills classes and the chance to learn a foreign language, culture of listening to students

Bath – good industry connections, sports facilities, involving students in decisions, even the design of some of the new accommodation buildings, dedicated student experience forum made up of students, senior academics and service staff heads

Falmouth – investment in teaching facilities, the development of a mentor scheme for incoming students and the introduction of more counselling and living support staff

Stirling – Reduced class sizes, improved student feedback and having employability embedded into its degrees

The article notes that post-92 universities, and in particular those aligned to million+ tend to have a more diverse student body, with mote mature students, and who are likely to be less satisfied.

Common themes from the article about how to succeed in student experience seem to revolve around involving students in decision making, genuinely responding to concerns and providing a wide forum for debate as well as embedding employability and improving feedback.

And as for the score for our university – well a disappointing drop (and difficult to understand when in the same year our NSS figures improved). Mind you in the previous year we had a significant climb of 14 places, which does bring into question how reliable such a small sample can be.

Comparing our scores against the means, then our biggest outliers are: Good social life; Good extra-curricular activities / societies; Good community atmosphere;Good accommodation.

Listening to Students

Posted on May 11, 2014 by mikehamlyn

In a moment of serendipity, in the last week I started looking at some online solutions for gathering and sharing feedback and evaluation of modules by students. In the same week, articles appeared in the press on the involvement of students in providing feedback, and how, when and why we listen to them.

(from http://learningspy.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/feedback-its-better-to-receive-than-to-give/)

In the first instance, the Times Higher provided a piece by Martin McQuillan of Kingston University, on selective hearing.

He starts with:

In recent months universities up and down the country have been engaged in a frenzy of activity in an effort to ensure a favourable report from their students in the National Student Survey. Slides are presented to students and articles written for campus newspapers detailing improvements to teaching and services made in response to student feedback; survey responses are solicited via emails and phone calls; course reps, societies and clubs are asked to encourage undergraduates to take part; and participants are offered the chance to win book tokens, printer credit, graduation ball tickets, iPads and Kindles.

So far so familiar. But the key point is in the next line where he emhasises that the universities who receive the most positive feedback (and possibly attain elevated league table positions because of this) are those who listen to student feedback throughout the year, not just in the time period of the NSS.

In terms of us at Staffordshire, then we will be looking to reinforce this in two ways – firstly by changing the way in which we advertise NSS to students – the emphasis in future will be on a continuous dialogue between school managers and their student bodies, starting in Welcome Week. Secondly, a more focused module evaluation system, with the right processes sitting behind it (ie not just a technological solution to get people to fill in questionnaires) will also provide a basis for dialogue.

Of course this is all very well when things are going right. as McQuillan says in the article:

However, universities are not as good at listening to the student body when it questions management decisions or criticises government policy.

On such occasions, dissenting voices are not considered co-creators of an academic community, but are instead frequently dismissed as part of a minority of troublemakers. In the rare event of student criticism that is accompanied by open displays of dissent, such as occupations and demonstrations, it is usually met with the full rigour of institutional procedure and more often than not criminal law.

The challenge then, is to accept that if we are regarding our students as co-creators (and it appears in our Academic Strategy) then we have to be prepared to deal with tough questions accordingly.

Balanced against this though, is how well prepared are students to act as co-creators, and to provide the right kind of feedback. In a linked article, Joanna Williams of and Jennie Bristow of the University of Kent argue that the student voice has been “tamed, domesticated and institutionalised”.

Noting that the rebelliousness of students seen in previous generations, has for the most part disappeared, or is swiftly put down by forces of law, they note that the student voice:

is encapsulated in the image of the good student who gives feedback when asked, contributes to staff-student liaison committees and makes only realistic suggestions that confirm a consensus. Regardless of the type of institution attended or the diversity of the student body within an institution, the student voice proves itself remarkable in its homogeneity. Demands for assessed work to be returned more quickly and with better feedback echo around every university in the country.

As I suggested above, I think it key that dialogue occurs between the two parties. Williams and Bristow write:

Lecturers who do not take heed of the student voice risk a poor departmental performance in the National Student Survey, and a low ranking for their university in institutional league tables. The following year, “customers” may not be so forthcoming.

This can make it difficult for academics to challenge the student voice, resulting in what Duna Sabri, visiting research fellow at King’s College London, has termed “the sacralisation of the discourse of ‘the student experience’”.

The first paragraph is true – and if customer” or students do not come, then subject areas might be under threat. But rather than dismiss the student voice, again the need is to recognise the benefit of engagement. Williams and Bristow do usefully identify that there is work to do by universities, in developing their students so that:

For students, the aspiration to be the intellectual equals of their lecturers and critically engaged in the search for new knowledge or the reinterpretation of existing knowledge is entirely laudable. But this should be a privilege students earn after having engaged in an intellectual struggle to master the foundations of a discipline.

Student voice however does need to go beyond just the challenge of the discipline. Students are paying or borrowing substantial sums of money to be at our universities, and rightly expect certain standards of provision to exist, however they won’t know everything (although I’ve met plenty of undergraduates who think they do. And not a small number of staff too).

(from http://www.joebower.org/2014/04/the-problem-with-getting-students-to.html)

In a separate piece in the Guardian (student feedback is a waste of everyone’s time) , an anonymous academic rails against the way in which students are able to comment on his or her lecturing, on the content of courses and how enagaging the lectures are.

Comments included: “They are not experts in the field and are not well-placed to assess the relative merits of a course.”, “The course content reflects academic research and theory on the subject and is not up for discussion.”

In more detail:

Student feedback is a waste of everyone’s time. It’s disingenuous to ask students constantly to complete feedback forms that will probably do little more than fester on a hard drive until someone needs to cherry-pick the good comments for annual reports or applications for promotion.

It’s also completely redundant: universities appoint external examiners who review course content and marking annually, and there are regular peer observations by colleagues. These ensure professional standards are maintained. As to the question of whether students are satisfied, I’d rather they had an education.

Really? Feedback from students can be powerful and useful, if used properly. And teh reference to external examiners is a red herring – their role is to assure academic standards, not the overall experience of students. Peer observation has a place, provided it is genuinely developmental, but does rely on our peers being prepared to challenge us.

The perceived arrogance in the piece prompted debate on Twitter and in the comments under the article are well worth reading. All I would say, is that this is an approach to take that is guaranteed to disengage students. We’re not here to make it difficult for the sake of it. The subject might be difficult, but we want students to have an experience that allows then to engage with their learning and to become schooled in the discipline, and when necessary have that conversation with us, with respect on both sides, to allow us to improve it.

The University Steve Jobs would have built?

Posted on April 6, 2014 by mikehamlyn

I’m shamelessly ripping off the title, from a piece on forbes.com by Carmine Gallo, author of “The Apple Experience, secrets to building insanely great customer loyalty”.

(from http://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-Experience-Building-Insanely-Customer-ebook/dp/B007FP98HY/)

Gallo writes in his short article about work he did with Walnut Hill Medical Centre in Dallas, and this was what grabbed my attention:

“Enhancing the patient experience has now become an increasingly important goal for virtually all the hospitals in the country. They are all waking up to the fact that the quality of their customer experience will impact their bottom line,” according to Dr. Rich Guerra at Walnut Hill.

Replace patient with student, and hospital with university, then this applies to us too. This is not to say that universities also have to worry about other relationships, such as with research collaborators, funding councils, central and local government and other stakeholders, but for a teaching led institution like ours, then we know that student experience (and importantly success) is critical to us.

Gallo has three parts to his book: inspiring your internal customer; serving your external customer and setting the stage. There’s something in all of these that could be of value to a university embarking on significant change and campus developments.

In the article, Gallo refers to 7 principles from the “Steve Jobs playbook”:

Look outside your industry for inspiration.
Start with the right vision.
Hire people with an aptitude for service.
Greet customers with a warm welcome.
Train every employee to deliver steps of service every time.
Design spaces to make people feel better.
Leverage mobile technology.

Would it really be that difficult to apply this to a university setting? After all hospitals and universities have many similarities – we transform lives; we employ a lot of clever people; we employ large numbers of service and back office staff to make the place work; we want our clients (I’m not going to write customers) to succeed and have a good experience.

Look outside your industry for inspiration

So often universities look to each other to decide what to do next, hence a set of research , learning and teaching and student experience strategies that are interchangeable between institutions. Could we identify better examples of managing student experience in the tourism industry or healthcare sector?

Start with the right vision

This must be a no-brainer, but having a simple vision that everyone can sign up to is the starting point of getting your staff, your internal customer, onto the right page. Our VC’s blog last week, talking about importance of league tables, is an example of this.

Hire people with an aptitude for service

We know we need to employ staff with these skills in our services, but do we consider it enough when recruiting academic staff? As well as wanting to recruit great academics, we need to make sure that they are able to deliver the right educational experience to students.

Greet customers with a warm welcome

Yes, I know this is right out of the Apple Store manual, but again, why wouldn’t we do this? I have to say that at Open Days and at moving in weekend, we are actually really good at this.

Train every employee to deliver steps of service every time

Again, a bit retail orientated, but if we are recruiting to offer good service to create a good student experience, are we doing enough to make sure everyone knows what it is they need to do?

Design spaces to make people feel better.

Ok, for us it won;t be “feel better”, but it will be “learn better”. As we enter a period of deciding what our campus should look like mean there is an opportunity for a discussion on building the kind of spaces that support learning.And my view is that this does not mean more lecture theatres. The open space in Brindley seems to have a lot of learning going on whenever I am in there, and we need to learn, again from other industries, what might be the best way of shaping and using our space.

Leverage Mobile Technology

I’ve written before, in my blog post about digifest14, on how the future of digital is going to be huge, and that it’s about more than having an iPad.Linking to the point above about spaces through, we need to consider how we will use technology, and importantly be able to react and use new technologies, to support learning. This isn’t about minor changes such as having BlackBoard Mobile, this is about all of us being able to use technology to deliver education in a different way

So, some initial thoughts, based on one article and a quick skim through Gallo’s book. There is a danger of being sucked into the Apple fanboy view of the world, worshipping at the altar of Jobs, but there are soem good ideas in this that I will return to in my next installment of “We can be better than this”.

We Can be Better Than This. Part 3

Posted on March 23, 2014 by mikehamlyn

I keep returning to this theme, but since I have a role in academic enhancement, and specifically to look at ways of improving the attainment of individual students, with the resultant impact this should have on institutional success, then it’s really key for me.

Firstly, we now moving into the league table season (ignoring the THE World Rankings, as like most chippy northerners in million+ we don’t trouble them too much). The data is all in and is being counted and manipulated by the various compilers. Looking at some of the data through Heidi, then some of the work we did last year seems to be paying dividends. The next step really would be to be able to model all of the parameters used in the various tables, and develop some predictive tools, which will allow us to target specific areas, either academic subjects, or aspects of finance or staffing..

Secondly, we need to reinforce this message of student attainment and institutional success across our institution. I’ve given talks and presentations on league tables and student attainment to 10 out of our 12 schools, where we look at how the input of academic practice impacts on league table performance,.I always ask where in a league table do we think we should be. The answer has never been lower than 70th. This is a huge strength we can tap into – we have a university plan that clearly states our ambition in this area, and we have huge numbers of staff who believe we can be there! We should not underestimate what a powerful engine for change this can be, if harnessed properly. To help reinforce the message, then this years Staff Fest Learning and Teaching Conference is on 1st July, and is all about student success. This is an area that everyone should be engaged in. A success for me will be if there are too many attendees for us to fit into the lecture theatre – take that as a challenge!

Thirdly, we could look again at some of the messages Gordon Tredgold proposed in his recent leadership workshop on FAST (focus, accountable, simple, transparent). Linking this to work on improving student and institutional success means cutting through complex action plans, strategies, pilots projects etc and making a simple statement – “we want to be a top 50 university”, and then making sure our actions all relate to that, for instance:

focus on student success to improve degrees outcomes and help individual students to attain their goals;
recruit the best students possible – this might be a virtuous circle if we move up a league table
improve employability of our students mainly by making sure they get good degrees and ensuring our graduate attributes have a real impact
make sure we make favourable data returns
ensure we investigate and provide remedies for the outliers in the data (as always there are some)
develop an aspirational portfolio of undergraduate and postgraduate awards – top universities teach certain subjects
use portfolio perform ace measures to decide the shape of the portfolio, not just market information

We’re at an interesting time – the changing rules on student number controls, possible future changes in fee caps, consolidation of our campuses, changes in technology and estate redevelopments mean that now should be the time to have a clear focus and simple target.

After all, as Lou Reed sang, you’re going to reap just what you sow.

#digifest14 – What happens next?

Posted on March 14, 2014 by mikehamlyn

The closing speech at #digifest14 was by Ray Hammond, a self-styled futurologist. These are my notes, more details can be found on the Jisc website.

Hammond suggests that we have no language for the future, that the lack of language may inhibit our thinking, for instance the idea of a “mobile phone” does not begin to describe what such a device does today. It is also not useful in explaining future of where the device is going and blinkers us to what it might become. Lack of language makes it difficult for us when new technology arrives. We might have a word but no shared mental model. How can we best exploit a technology? What are downsides? A lack of common language means we cannot understand implications

Today our lives are mediated by technology. Future of education will be shaped by technology but does not take away human component. For instance we are now building an “always on” network. Form of connectiveness that can’t be described easily, so what is this digitally connected place?

Hammond proposed 6 drivers of change

1. In our students’ lifetime there will asymmetric population growth. Most in sub Saharan Africa. Another 50% of people will need fresh water and food.

2. Continuing climate change.

3. Ongoing energy crisis. Because of population growth and greenhouse effect. Need cleaner and more sustainable energy when demand could increase by 100%

4. Continuing modem globalisation. Truth lies between between 2 poles of viewing globalisation as evil or as an opportunity for unfettered capitalism. Globalisation if ethical and sustainable is greatest force for good.

5. Triple medical science revolutions: DNA decoding and profiling; stem cell medicine and nano scale medicine, eg drug delivery. This could lead to personalised medicine, and increasing lifespans for those in the rich world and who could afford. Who wants to live forever?

6. Accelerating exponentially technology development. Causes dislocation and problems with understanding. For example, kids who want to build apps. 6 years ago they didn’t exist! (or at least the term didn’t). What will we be talking about in 5 years?

I’m not sure these ideas were revolutionary – I remember having conversations in the 1980s about teh challenges of population growth and food and water security.

But there is no denying, the rate of technology change is accelerating in a non linear manner.

4 years ago no-one had an iPad, and no-one could have described how they might use one. To find out how long iPads have been around, I spoke to my iPad, and Siri told me the answer.

At this conference nearly everyone was using a mobile keyboard-less, wireless device to take notes, photographs, share messages, collaborate, engage in debate, contribute, check references, read, listen, etc.

Here’s my prediction. In 10 years we won’t be carrying a recognisable tablet computer. If I knew what we would be using, I’d be working somewhere else.

So what does this all mean for us in higher education?

A later blog post will return to the ideas of #digifest14, and try to create a manifesto for change for a university, which considers all the disparate developments in a digital world: in business intelligence; in learning and teaching; in the ideas of hackerspace and skunkworks; in responding to changing student needs and expectations; changed student populations; in changing staff abilities and identities and finding a way of encompassing this at the heart of an organisation

I’ll tell you something else about this future – it’s a going to be lot more than buying and installing a few new components for a VLE or a student information system.

Hang on, it’s going to be a fun ride.

Digital Environments and Identity

Posted on March 14, 2014 by mikehamlyn

This blog piece is based on 2 of the workshops at #digifest14, “Understanding students’ expectations and experiences of the digital environment” and “Visitors and residents: understanding student behaviours online”.

The first of these looked at previous Jisc supported work and started with a review of expectations and experiences which recognised the need to differentiate between general digital environment and study environment and digital aspects

Today students’ transactional needs include hygiene factors such as wifi.

Students have vague or blurry expectations of how they will learn with technology

Younger students expect technology to be frictionless. Many uni systems are quite chunky in comparison.

The workshop focussed on:

Can institution meets students rising expectations of digital access and use?
Do your students learning experiences prepare them to live and work in a digital society?
It’s 2020. How will students experience digital environment?

More detail on this can be found at the digital student blog and design studio pages.

The second workshop looked at ideas of digital identity, and how students and staff might behave online. The starting point was Prensky’s idea of digital natives and immigrants. This has been superseded in the intervening years, since Prensky differentiated by generation, suggesting that the young were digital natives. In this newer approach, David White of Oxford University suggests the terms resident and visitor, and further separates behaviours depending on whether they are professional/institutional or personal.

As an exercise we each mapped our digital identity using referring to each of our online presences. An interesting issue arose – if a service such as Twitter is used and is just professional, how much can be personal? Is there an advantage in revealing something of yourself as an individual as part of the need for authenticity, especially for leaders (see Goffee and Jones – “Why Should Anyone be Led by You?”).

These were a pair of really interesting workshops – and thinking back to my blog post on the need to put “digital” at the centre of what we do, they give us some tools to understand what our students expect and experience, and what we might need to do when looking at our own digital competence and identity

Students, consumers, prices, value?

Posted on March 3, 2014 by mikehamlyn

The last few years have seen upheavals in UK higher education. Coupled with apocalyptic visions about the possible future of the sector, we are clearly living in interesting times, where changes in finance, in technology and in students and staff themselves mean that we don’t stand still, but constantly evolve or face extinction.

Those with longer memories would suggest that “twas ever thus”. The growth of universities in industrial towns in the 19th century, The expansion after the Robbins report. The move from a binary system, leading to polytechnics and universities being on the same footing. The growth of private providers. Wherever you sit on an exponential curve, it will always seem to be exponential.

A key change for us all to grapple with though, is the nature of the “student experience”, and ensuring that our students are not just satisfied in a simplistic customer-supplier relationship, but that they are gaining real long term benefit from their investment in higher education, no matter what kind of student they are.

In an earlier article I referred to the report from Mike Boxall of PA consulting which was proposing a “student deal”, which was more encompassing than the sometimes limited approach that universities take to describing student experience. In the last week Smita Jamdar, of SGH Martineau, has written a blog article on “Price is what you pay, value is what you get“.

In this, Smita looks at the view of the Office of Fair Trading which said ““There are worrying signs the higher education market is not working to promote value for money for students, and this has to change” and considers what this means from a legal perspective.

She identifies three main points:

The first is that there is not necessarily any consensus on what it looks like in the context of tertiary education. Many of those responding to the YouGov poll emphasised employability as key, but it is not clear if students themselves see this as the main benefit. Which? has previously linked value to contact hours and quality/frequency of feedback as well as long term graduate salaries. However, at a conference I attended yesterday, Toni Pearce, President of the NUS, described a focus on contact hours as reductionist.

The second is that that alternatives to higher education are becoming increasingly well promoted. Apprenticeships and higher apprenticeships, for example, are now viable options for more young people, so being able to articulate the value for money a degree or similar qualification offers in comparison is important in beating off this competition for would-be students.

The third is that universities and colleges are not necessarily very good at articulating the value for money they offer

Smita argues that it is important to understand what value is, to minimise student complaints. Value therefore has to go beyond the simple transactional “I paid my fees, I expect to receive this many lectures”.

The current obsession with providing more external data, such as through KIS, means that we are in danger of embedding this approach to value and reducing it to a simplistic or mechanistic system that cannot measure the true benefits to students. The number of ccntact hours is an obvious case. Again, as Smita rightly argues:

unless institutions can articulate value better, any investigation by the OFT is likely to be dominated by a push for more data to enable direct comparison of institutional offers, and the linking of price to measurables such as contact hours, rather than by a recognition of the diverse and distinct benefits that different institutions offer

The challenge for us then, is to clearly articulate what we mean by student experience, byt engaging more closely with our students and other stakeholders, to produce a broader description of what the “deal” is. This will mean clearly showing what fees are to cover (including a clear articulation of how loans actually work, the RAB charge and the expectations and commitments to paying back).In addition, the deal must show how the student is engaged in a two way relationship with the provider, and where responsibilities for success lie at the interface between the two, and require active engagement of the two, rather than the reductive transactional view.

Universities need to seize the initiative on communicating this. We need to be able to show clearly that our students are not just passive consumers, but actively engaged in a relationship with us; that there is more to education than the sticker price, and that the full value of higher education cannot be reduced to a simple set of metrics, driven by a consumer campaign group approach.

The Student Deal

Posted on February 20, 2014 by mikehamlyn

A new publication this week from PA Consulting, “The Student Deal” provides thoughts on looking beyond student experience and proposing a deal that engages students, providers and governments. I’m late to the party on this one – Registrarism has already blogged about it here, but I’ll add my thoughts and how this approach should be considered by a non-elite university.

PA recognise that HE is an international buyers market, but question the usefulness of “student experience”, as currently defined, as a useful metric:

“This preoccupation with student experience metrics and satisfaction has been strongly encouraged by Government and features heavily in composite university league tables….

Most current approaches to student experience reify the notion of the student -as-customer and apply quasi-commercial customer service approaches to the transactional aspects of student-provider relations.

This is apparent in the structure of the National Student Survey (NSS), which unwittingly invites comparisons between the ‘student journey’ and the elements of a packaged holiday, with the NSS akin to the TripAdvisor of higher education.”

However PA contend that the language of the student-as-customers neglects the essential mutual commitment between students and universities and instead propose a multifaceted student deal.

Students study for a variety of reasons, and not just to consume educational and related services, they are instead investing in a relationship that they hope will enhance the rest of their lives, and so need to be concerned with the benefits of developing a relationship with a particular university which goes beyond the subject material that they study.

PA recognise that a number of universities are trying to tackle this through the idea of graduate attributes – the Staffordshire Graduate would be a good example of this. This is in recognition of the fact that employers want to recruit people with T-shaped attributes – a blend of vertical knowledge and horizontal capabilities.

The challenge therefore for universities is how to provide the context and resources for students to develop into T-shaped people, providing a “rich, multifaceted and joined-up portfolio of co-curricular and extra-curricular learning experiences. Such experiences demand at least as much from the students as from academic and other staff, with learning outcomes as co-produced goals.”

PA propose the following 4 core essentials, which I have then mapped against our SG attributes to see how well they match:

PA Core Outcomes	Staffordshire Graduate Attributes
Mastery of discipline based knowledge	Discipline Expert Have an understanding of the forefront of knowledge in your chosen field
Expertise in applying knowledge and skills	Reflective & Critical Have the ability to carry out inquiry-based learning and critical analysis Be a problem solver and creator of opportunities
Growth in personal effectiveness	Professional Be prepared to be work-ready and employable, and understand the importance of being enterprising and entrepreneurial
Improved career and life opportunities	Global Citizen Have an understanding of global issues – and their place in a globalised economy Communication & Teamwork Be an effective communicator and presenter – and be able to interact appropriately and confidently with a range of colleagues Have developed the skills of independence of thought and, where appropriate, social interaction through teamwork Life Long Learner Be technologically, digitally and information literate Be able to apply Staffordshire Graduate attributes to a range of life experiences – to facilitate life-long learning and life-long success

Our own graduate attributes do seem to map well at this point, but there is more work we could possibly do in future to ensure that they become more embedded in the student deal, that the attributes are very clearly related to outcomes and that our students can articulate clearly what the attributes mean for them.

The diagram below from PA shows how they interpret the 4 facets of the proposed student deal.

The report goes on to point out that the Student Deal relies on meeting the ambitions of individuals with the resources and personalised support available through institutions. I believe this creates the challenge for a university such as ours – it’s relatively easy to develop a set of Graduate Attributes, and work out how to assess them, for “traditional” full time undergraduates on 3 year programmes, but as the report highlights:

“A student journey and set of experiences designed for young, full-time, campus-based students is unlikely to work for older, part-time and home or work-based learners. Such students have much clearer views of what they seek from engagement in higher learning, and much stronger expectations of sharing as equals in the design and experience of a fulfilling Student Deal.

Given the limited growth foreseen in the traditional full-time undergraduate cohort (at least for the next few years), this has profound implications for universities’ and other providers’ responses to the emerging buyers’ market for their business”

So since one size will not fit all, universities will have to tailor their student deals to the diversity of markets in which they operate.

“This differentiation must extend to every aspect of the deal, from the design and delivery of learning materials, to the ways in which learners can engage with tutors and peers, to the co- and extra-curricular experiences provided as part of the provider’s offer.”

The fundamentally conservative nature of university operating procedures, and the obsession with 3 year undergraduate programmes does make it difficult to move out of current entrenched silos. PA suggest looking at Business Schools for ideas – they frequently have a more diverse student population. This is definitely the case for us.

The student deal, as proposed, is about a two way commitment between learners and providers – this explicit deal is proposed to ensure that students do take advantage of all opportunities, eg placements, volunteering and other extra curricular activity.

PA conclude with this diagram, showing how they think that a student deal, rather than the existing metrics on student experience, provide better information for all stakeholders, and will enable people to make better choices in future.

Overall, a report worth reading – as we move into a market that is going to be ever more stratified, and where differentiation will be increasingly important, finding new ways of expressing what we offer to potential students and other stakeholders will become increasingly important. The criticisms of NSS and its associated metrics, and links to KIS have been well articulated elsewhere. This is a set of ideas that might help to provide more meaningful information and lead to enhanced student outcomes.

Mike Hamlyn

another blog about HE in the UK

Category Archives: Student Experience