Challenges

The Students FIRST project pulled together a group of technologies – financial information app, bursary on a smarcard, and social messaging tools (texting) – to help improve progression and retention. However, there were some challenges in this approach:

• technologies, such as smartcard or mobile apps, may be used in a “scattergun” approach and need to be part of a strategic service delivery
• staff can be unwilling to engage with new technologies; for example, because they don’t want to remember additional logins
• staff must be trained in the use of any new technologies, but it can be difficult to find the resource to do so.

Benefits

Access to the bursary is staggered according to student progression; i.e. a student must progress to the second year of their studies in order to receive the second installment. Students can then purchase from a list of products specified by their institution, such as books, art materials, nursery fees, campus accommodation, etc. Almost 74% of students surveyed at one university found that the bursary was beneficial. Other benefits include:

• establishing a clear link between the spend on books and academic achievement
• a targeted bursary encourages students to achieve and progress
• such a bursary also equalises opportunity across the student body; for example, one student said “I have access to books that otherwise I wouldn’t be able to own and progress further”.

Recommendations

A collaborative approach to this project was taken with a mix of educational and commercial providers and this gave the project team the opportunity to draw up guidance materials on working across different sectors. Recommendations include:

• taking a service design approach can help you to understand student needs, expose failpoints in service delivery, and build collaborative relationships between departments/institutions and providers
• sharing data between institutions can be a cause for concern, so consider alternatives such as using separate hard drives to store data
• actively engage with technologies with which students are familiar, such as mobile apps, to encourage engagement.

Further Information

If you would like to find out more about this project, the following resources may help:

• Blog: Shared Student Retention Blog
• Project Website: Students’ FIRST Website
• Case Study: Students FIRST Financial Interventions to assist Retention and Student Transitions (PDF Format, 930Kb)
• Videos:
  • JISC Students FIRST Student Views on Bursary Provision
  • Service Mapping JISC Video
  • Students FIRST Main Project Video
  • Students FIRST Tech Providers

Challenges

Data held by institutions is not always easy to access. For example:

• data held across a number of systems only offers a partial or disjointed view of information that may be relevant to staff and students
• multiple systems require multiple log-ins; for example, Student Services at Southampton need to switch between four different applications in order to amalgamate student information
• selecting the data that tutors might need to see on a dashboard can be contentious; for example information from Finance or Student Counselling services.

Benefits

In common with other projects that have focussed on using data to identify “at risk” students, the project team identified the following benefits:

• providing a complete view of an institution’s student data enables staff to identify any early signs of problems and possible non-progression
• improving access to data can encourage the organisational culture to be more innovative and transparent
• by allowing a small set of data to be shown to pastoral tutors, it is expected that this will generate requests for more data to be included.

Recommendations

Encouraging people to open up access to data can be challenging. Issues of data access and organisational culture can be difficult to handle, so try to:

• manage change carefully to ensure that all stakeholders are engaged, especially those who have power to implement change and those who have influence over opinion in the institution
• identify champions in each group of stakeholders, who will help drive through changes
• find out what data is held by each stakeholder and how it is accessed (some of it may be paper-based) as this can help determine how that data could be accessed in a dashboard; it can also expose information that some stakeholders didn’t even know existed.

Further Information

If you would like to find out more about this project, the following resources may help:

• Blog: Student Dashboard Blog
• Project Website: SLE Dashboard Website
• Case Study: Ninjas and Dragons (PDF format, 4.35Mb)
• Video: Not yet available.

Challenges

The relationships between teaching staff, administrative staff, students and businesses are an essential part of effective placement management. Challenges from the institution’s viewpoint included:

• a variety of unconnected processes used across the institution
• finding a way to ensure that common good practice was recorded and shared
• being able to record baseline placement data for employability statistics without imposing any centralised control across schools.

Benefits

As well as some technological improvements, the project has resulted in a number of benefits for both staff and students, including:

• improved adminstrative efficiency from streamlining processes and extra facilities for data reporting; for example, it is now possible to identify students who make a number of unsuccessful placement applications in order to provide them with additional support
• more effective management of relationships with students whilst they are on placement; such as providing a single point of contact and improved methods of communication
• a number of enthusastic champions of good practice across the University have been identified as a result of the project.

Recommendations

For placement processes to be handled effectively, it is recommended that:

• senior management and practitioners are encouraged to be champions in good practice for placements with the role of a placement co-ordinator acting as a central conduit for relationships and communication
• when implementing such a project, staff need to “talk to people on their terms” to win them over and to promote an understanding of what people are doing and why; communication is key and can help enable “change by stealth”
• remember that the learning and administrative aspects of the placement process are co-dependent and that technology alone cannot replace the human element.

Further Information

If you would like to find out more about this project, the following resources may help:

• Blog: ESCAPES Blog
• Project Website: ESCAPES Website
• Case Study: ESCAPES Case Study (PDF Format, 825Kb)
• Video: ESCAPES Video.

Challenges

The project team team has tried to formalise the thought processes and relationships regarding provision of support and identified a number of challenges, including:

• developments in the real-world can get ahead of institutional strategy; e.g. there are issues around allowing the College to use Facebook
• the lack of strategy around the introduction of new technologies, such as iPads
• changes in personnel can affect any improvements being made.

Benefits

The project team established several new approaches to improve access to student support, including:

• a structured and auditable “pipeline of support” through which learners can move; the ten steps in this process can be used as a checklist for performance evaluation of the support offered
• a Blackboard mobile app was implemented, alongside access to iPads, in order to extend access to support. This not only gives students access to learning content but also allows the learner to submit medical self-certification forms electronically
• these improvements should lead to increased student confidence, performance and retention.

Recommendations

When tackling improvements at a time when resources are scarce, it can be helpful to:

• give staff responsible for delivering a service the chance to take ownership of any activities leading to process improvement
• encourage staff to complete bite-sized activities so that they are not taken away from day-to-day operations, as this may reduce resentment to any new methods of working
• make small improvements, even if resources are scarce. For example, whilst social media services, such as Facebook, were seen as positive ways to interact with support services by students, staff resources weren’t available at the College to manage this. The project team addressed this issue by designing postcards with QR codes, so that students can get immediate access via their smartphone to the support team’s e-mail.

Further Information

If you would like to find out more about this project, the following resources may help:

• Blog: Shared Student Retention Blog: North Glasgow College
• Project Website: Support for All Website
• Case Study: Support For All (PDF format, 1.84Mb)
• Video: Support For All

Challenges

The project team found that having access to the data is not enough, there needs to be a balance between automated and human interventions, for example:

• educational data mining is complex and will be unsuccessful if used solely to identify “at risk” students without human intervention processes being designed
• incorporating more student-centred approaches into the development of exisiting systems (such as VLEs, student data systems, attendance recording systems etc) can be challenging
• changes in processes and the introduction of new software systems can be seen as threatening to staff.

Benefits

The project team looked at both staff and student needs by:

• using service design techniques to help identify learner needs, such as flexibility of study, planning of deadlines for coursework, and employability, for example
• providing more and better quality learner information to help a tutor be more active in identifying and supporting “at risk” students; for example teaching sessions where attendance is taken electronically are designated as being “critical” or not, so e-mails are sent only to students missing “critical” sessions
• developing a standardised process for managing placements across three departments in order to reduce student anxiety around the process.

Recommendations

The relationships that students have with staff are vital to the enhancement of the student experience, but the relationships that staff have within in the organisation are also important. For example:

• provide staff with access to learner data to help them identify any human interventions that need to be made
• use the student voice to influence improvements
• sincere management buy-in is critical, otherwise an institution’s organisational structure will remain a barrier no matter what improvements are suggested.

Further Information

If you would like to find out more about this project, the following resources may help:

• Blog: Pedestal for Progression Blog
• Project Website: Pedestal for Progression Website
• Case Study: Case Study of the Pedestal for Progression Project (PDF Format, 13.36Mb)
• Video: Pedestal for Progression Project.

Challenges

Institutions generally hold a vast array of data about students, often in different systems which are not always interoperable. The data challenges experienced in this project include:

• predisposing factors, such as responsibility as a carer, means that students are more likely to withdraw from their studies, however it’s not always possible to capture this type of data as it’s not generally held in any IT system
• there is little interoperability between different data systems; for example, the data required to populate an engagement dashboard is held in at least seven different systems at the University
• each student is an individual who brings with them individual challenges to succeeding at and engaging with higher education

Benefits

Scoping out the type of data to be included in a dashboard of core engagement data:

• means that staff would be able to view a student’s level of engagement with the institution; for example, linking data on absences, access to the library and the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) could help a tutor see if the student was still engaging in the course, even if they were absent due to illness
• has produced a change of thinking in the way students at risk of withdrawing will be supported at the University; i.e. it will be more proactive than reactive
• has helped staff identify key points in the student lifecycle where students are most likely to be at risk of withdrawal.

Recommendations

Engagement analytics goes beyond the hard data recorded in learning analytics, because:

• it’s dangerous to make decisions about student engagement based solely on a set of data, as understanding the context of the data is important and developing the relationship between the tutor and student is essential
• both staff and students find it useful to have their own customisable engagement dashboards
• soft data that can’t always be found on institutional systems should also be recorded and considered.

Further Information

If you would like to find out more about this project, the following resources may help:

• Blog: Shared Retention, Progression and Non-Completion Blog: University of Derby
• Project Website: SETL Website
• Case Study: Student Experience Traffic Lighting (PDF Format, 1.27Mb)
• Videos:
  • Personas
  • Student Experience Traffic Lighting – Engagement Analytics

This latest round of projects, which will run until July 2012, is split into three different strands:
* Strand 1: Good practice in CRM (Customer Relationship Management) – projects yet to be confirmed. A project to deliver a comprehensive online handbook of good practice in CRM processes for HE (Higher Education) and FE (Further Education).
* Strand 2: Student progression, retention and non-completion (8 projects). Demonstrator projects delivering service innovations that improve the quality of the student experience, specifically to enhance progression and retention to minimise non-completion.
* Strand 3: Alumni engagement (7 projects). Demonstrator projects developing and validating innovative processes and harnessing web technologies to support mutally beneficial alumni engagement.

The projects in Strands 2 and 3 follow on from the SLRM projects in the last Programme, but focus on different stages of the student lifecycle.

If you are interested in the progress of the projects, you can find further information from the JISC CETIS RMSAS (Relationship Management Support, Analysis and Synthesis) website or follow the Twitter tag: #rminhe.

If the last projects from the last Programme are anything to go by, the level of expertise in relationship management in the institutions involved will increase considerably, so we wish all the projects in this latest Programme every success.