Student engagement workshop
This was a discussion around the mechanisms and culture of student engagement with a particular focus upon how we reach students who are not 18-24 yr old undergraduates. As a group, we realised that we knew very little about the expectations of those students, the ways in which they might wish to engage, or the limits they wished to place on their own engagement.
Certain types of engagement might be there (e.g. part-time students attending block teaching intensives who give very rich feedback on module evaluations but who do not engage with student liaison committees) but we are not recognising it. We recognised that we were trying to fit very different student constituencies into a single student engagement model and then becoming concerned when these models don’t reach certain types of groups. There is some learning to be done here about the flexibility of institutional models for student engagement and how far these take into account the diversity of the student body.
The challenge is not just for the institution alone but also for the student body – Students’ Unions are not typically good at representing the diversity of their own student constituencies.
This flags an underlying challenge on a broader scale: in a higher education system which has typically defined ‘graduate-ness’ and the student experience as residential, youth-centred and broader than the degree itself – what is the shape and content of the ‘student offer’ to a part-time student, a distance learner, a cpd student?
Student engagement also challenges our notions of the shape and content of quality management. To a student the student experience is a single whole containing aspects that we pigeonhole as academic, academic related and non-academic (put simply, lectures, libraries and car parks!) . The feedback we get from students covers this continuum and factors in one area can affect satisfaction or engagement in another. One potential question in quality management therefore may be about why and how we maintain boundaries between different quality mechanisms for academic provision and for non-academic services.
A few snippets of practice from elsewhere in the sector:
- A Students’ Union planning to bring an annual equivalent of the (Audit) Students Written Submission forward for response by its institution
- Use of regular open meetings for students with senior managers including the Vice-Chancellor
- An audit of the types and quality of student participation through all different methods and channels in an institution in order to map what occurs where and what is effective
- Division of agendas for Student Experience Committees into academic and non-academic items, with precedence given to non-academic items
- Rotating committee meetings around various campuses and times to enable a range of students to join in
