enhancing the student experience: overcoming post-pandemic challenges
Before the pandemic, a Group of 8 (Go8) University had created a Student Experience Strategy to enhance the overall experience for students at their campus.
After the pandemic, the University realised that the pandemic had significantly impacted the student experience and had changed the playing field.
This hampered the University’s ability to achieve its original strategic objectives, so they engaged our team to review their Strategy and provide recommendations to address the gaps.
our challenges
We had the following challenges for this project.
review the current Strategy
Assess the Strategy’s strengths, weaknesses, successes and opportunities to determine the current state of initiatives and which should be carried forward.
conduct an environmental audit
Analyse the trends in student experience initiatives (including personal growth and employability) throughout the higher education sector, searching for best practices through a benchmarking exercise.
“I absolutely love that you haven’t provided a cookie-cutter approach. This has all been very impressive and insightful!”
engage the University community
Consult widely including subject matter experts across central teams, faculties, and external industry partners, to understand their perspectives on supporting the student experience.
raise the Student Voice
Speak with students to understand their needs, pain points and aspirations about studying post-pandemic to avoid making assumptions based on pre-pandemic student interactions.
Due to strained internal relationships, the University leadership had slight concerns about some teams’ participation levels. An underlying goal for our team was to repair and rebuild these relationships where possible, as these people were crucial to the success of future student experience improvement initiatives.
how we helped
Karana was a part of the team undertaking this Strategy review work. Working closely with two colleagues from the primary consulting company, our Director took a leading role in designing and delivering the project on time and with tangible outcomes.
understanding the context
We completed background research, reviewing reports, studies, and strategy documents. Karana’s education-specialist experience helped set timelines for tasks, identify critical dates according to the academic calendar, and designing the student consultation activity.
The tight timeframes required a team effort to complete the benchmarking exercise. One team member reviewed publicly available strategy documents and websites of Go8 universities and a handful of comparable international universities, including some Russell Group universities. We also looked at non-Go8 universities that recently performed well in relevant categories of the Student Experience Survey.
“It so fits our needs and its like it was created for us. So good that you weren’t here trying to tell us what would be best for a Harvard University or an Oxford.”
collecting our own data
Karana led the internal and external consultation sessions with our team, engaging over 100 stakeholders over a short period of 5 weeks. We ran small group workshops, large meetings, and individual interviews to collect feedback from staff, students, and external industry partners.
The large volume of collected data articulated people’s experiences, thoughts, concerns, and aspirations. Patterns of issues and resulting themes were grouped, with a handful of common areas becoming evident.
Positive experiences were captured to recognise where the University was performing well and should continue this work. Potential initiatives and ideas for improvement were captured and grouped together where relevant.
our results and the University’s future plans
We received positive feedback about our approach. People felt comfortable sharing their views and appreciated that the University had allowed them to be deeply involved in the process. All sessions were engaging with rich and valuable discussions.
The teams that the University leadership had slight concerns about were optimistic and eager to be involved in future engagements. We had taken significant steps towards rebuilding the strained relationships.
“The DVCE, PVC and EO are extremely impressed with the depth of understanding presented in the pack and think that it will form the basis for a very strong Student Experience Strategy for them.”
As the project lead, Karana presented milestone reports to the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) (DVCE) and their leadership team every fortnight. The final report was a compilation of these milestone reports with additional details of our findings. Some examples include:
Address foundational issues first. It was difficult for students to engage with innovative new ideas when their basic needs are not being met.
Highlight the importance of employability skills. Many students felt unprepared for life after studies even in their final year. The University could improve the level and types of career development support it provides to students.
Design experiences that are intentional and meaningful. The pandemic emphasised the significance of human interaction and connection. But going back to “how it used to be” means giving up the flexibility and access that remote learning provides. The University needs to co-design solutions with students that takes these diverse factors into consideration.
We delivered the project on time and with high-quality outcomes, evidenced by the DVCE’s excellent feedback and reception of our recommendations. The DVCE confirmed that the report would inform the University’s next student experience strategy and several improvement initiatives.
“Your engagement with us has been fantastic and exceeded all of our expectations.”
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