Last week’s conference provided me with an opportunity to contribute to and reflect on one of my absolute favourite areas of higher education to focus on in terms of what we can do individually and collectively to enhance the experiences of our students. This connects with work raison d’etre as I fundamentally believe in the transformative power of higher education.
The conference covered a range of areas from:
• student engagement
• student support and wellbeing
• Educational matters: professional development programmes for students and decolonising the curriculum
• academic freedom and freedom of speech
• international education strategy and internationalisation at home
Reference was made to the UN sustainability goals, the Faith Belief Forum and their Parliamentors programme, UKCISA (UK Council for International Student Affairs) project grants scheme
There were presentations that covered a student lifecycle approach to supporting learners with autism spectrum condition, UUK’s work on student initiations and the National Union of Students work on alcohol impact. The latter highlighted that whilst it is rare for young people to drink, their expectations pre-University is that this is part of university culture. Other findings shared included the message from the academic freedom survey in the UK was that a significant proportion of students consistently support academic freedom.
There were two key practical takeaways for me professionally as follows.
Impact on podcasts/blogs on student engagement
One session focused on developmental changes to student support and reflected on the increasing engagement with 5 minute podcasts and blogs as an effective means of student communications. This is a challenging area for many universities so I can definitely going to explore how we can extend the use of this approach. It also raised the question of whether the student handbook has outlined its purposefulness. Will the student handbook in its current format survive or will it be replaced by shorter bite size alternative information sources? I will leave this up to you to decide.
Making it explicit that students can contact staff by telephone or skype and not just by email or face-to-face
Another takeaway was hearing about an unintended benefit of changing the support provided for sandwich students: pre, during and post and one change in particular, which really benefited students living off campus. This as to provide a steer to their sandwich students and encouraged them to feel able to telephone/skype their academic advisers / module convenors as well as request face to face meetings. This steer was given from stage 1 in preparation for their time away from campus. The aim was to help students feel more able to contact staff in this way – students had previously perceived this as a barrier.
We were advised that taking this approach helped students feel more connected to the campus before, during and after their sandwich placement. It also enabled early detection of issues as more students contacted staff from their work placement than previously. It struck me that this approach generally regarding academic advising would have wider benefits for students who live off campus.
The conference also served to reinforce the following important messages:
• that we need to empower students to change things. The power of co-creation in empowering students to lead changes in partnership with universities. Paying attention to the students and their lived experience/s is how we will resolve barriers to engagement and make improvements
• the need to create spaces that drive conversations with students about important matters
• the utmost importance of fostering cross-working and a whole-institution approaches to enhancing students’ experiences
• that evaluating education and student experience interventions needs to be embedded into our customs and practice
• the power of creating, developing and using institutional frameworks to drive change in a systematic and holistic way as well as the impact of taking student lifecycle approach
Melissa Mulhall, Assistant Director, Student Engagement and Experience