December 23, 2021
Tools and Insights for Reimagining Your Student Experience
By Elliot Felix
As colleges and universities evaluate and reimagine their student experience post-pandemic, they have opportunities to keep what was working before, fix what wasn’t, and learn from the experience since the Spring of ‘20, as difficult as it has been.
Use the campus as a differentiator since moving online tended to flatten things into a unform shade of zoom-gray. Create more equitable experiences by race, income, and background. Foster a sense of community and belonging in what you do, how you communicate, the places you provide, and how you operate them. Engage students with class projects that solve problems they care about and help them explore career paths. Propel research that solves societal problems in your community and around the world. To name a few….
To help institutions think about their student experience, we’ve compiled a collection of insights and tools we’ve created over the past few years:
If you want to cut to the chase, we’ve identified 10 opportunities to improve your student experience in the wake of Covid-19. At brightspot, we’re big fans of science fiction author William Gibson’s observation that “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” So, each suggestion comes with an example, not to imitate but to prompt your thinking about the future.
If you want to take a step back first, a good place to start is by defining student experience and assessing what works and what doesn’t at your institution. In this post, we show you how by providing an overview of different methods and their pros and cons as well as some tips to get started.
Once you’ve looked over assessment methods, you can read stories from three institutions putting assessment into practice in different ways, for different reasons. It includes how to balance between standard, national assessment tools and local needs as well as how to bring students, faculty, and staff together to make sense of assessments and take action.
After becoming familiar with the ways to evaluate your student experience and seeing them in action, you can understand what the common pain points and solutions are, which are drawn from our student experience course for EDUCAUSE and contains lessons learned from the more than 50 participating institutions.
The online EDUCAUSE course used a studio-based approach where participating institutions used two of our open access tools and completed them in a shared doc so everyone could see and learn from peers’ thinking. You can use these tools as well: the Student Experience Canvas is a user research tool to synthesize insights about the experience of one student segment/persona across classes, technology, student services, facilities, and community – from applicant to alum. The Student Experience Roadmap is a strategic planning tool to prioritize and sequence the actions identified across different Student Experience Canvases, by unit/group and phase.
We believe that affordable access, engaging learning, holistic student support, diverse, inclusive communities, and equitable spaces are all within reach if colleges and universities can build on the changes you’ve made due to COVID, and redesign your student experience. We hope this collection of resources is a small step in helping you make it happen.