Student Experience

What are the three most important aspects of today’s student experience? Personalized learning, 24/7 access to technology, and online student services. In other words, it appears that higher education has adopted the old Burger King line, “Have it your way.” And students do. They no longer have to stand in line to register for classes, attend a class in person or even enter the library to do research. But the real question is, are schools and students utilizing the data collected in these information systems to make sure students are getting the most enhanced and personalized learning support for them to succeed? Not really, according to The ‘Personalization’ of Higher Education: Using Technology to Enhance the College Experience (Center for American Progress). In this brief, author Louis Soares finds more can be done and provides a series of technology innovation examples that are driving the “personalization” revolution in higher education, including recommendations for policymakers on how to facilitate this process. Institutions will need to put the core systems and infrastructure in place to transform student learning, but students will need to take responsibility too for their learning outcomes. In his article, “An Open Letter to Students: You're the Game Changer in Next-Generation Learning” (EDUCAUSE Review), Mark Milliron calls on students to step up to their responsibilities, claim their core rights, and push for more learning-centered, data-rich, and high-value educational pathways. In the end, both schools and students will need to take an active role to make the student experience the most successful and fulfilling educational experience to date.

Staff Picks

• ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2012. ECAR has surveyed undergraduate students annually since 2004 about technology in higher education. In 2012, ECAR collaborated with 195 institutions to collect responses from more than 100,000 students about their technology experiences.
• Service Blueprinting: Transforming the Student Experience, EDUCAUSE Review, November/December 2012. This article explains how the use of service design techniques such as service blueprinting supports a service-oriented view of higher education and aids in innovating and transforming the student experience.
• Leveraging Service Blueprinting to Rethink Higher Education, October 2011. This paper from the Center for American Progress takes the position that higher education is a service, or a service system, and that transformative initiatives aiming to address the types of problems noted earlier will benefit from viewing them through a service lens. A service lens puts the customer at the center of improvement and innovation initiatives, considers the customer experience to be a foundation for analyzing and making enhancements, and assumes the customer is a co-creator of value.
• Leading the Student Experience: Super-Convergence of Organisation, Structure and Business Processes, April 2012. This group of five case studies from the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education focuses on the U.K. higher education student experience.
• A Systems Approach: Expanding Access and Achieving Student Success through Support Services at Rio Salado College, March 2012. This report covers how Rio Salado College (RSC) in Tempe, Arizona, provides a full slate of support services to its online learners. The report was designed to capture the essence of a relatively large number of departments and initiatives that touch the faculty, staff, and students at RSC. It also describes the historic path that has brought RSC to where it is today: the largest public, nonprofit, online two-year college in the United States.
• From Insight to Action: Translating Student Voice into Education Transformation, EDUCAUSE Live! September 2012. Business Innovation Factory's Student Experience Lab has launched exploratory work during the past three years to bring the student experience to life in a new way in order to make the student voice more central to our conversation about transforming education.
• Podcast: An Urge to Make a Difference in the Lives of Students, March 2012. In this keynote from the EDUCAUSE 2012 Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference, Kathy Humphrey, vice provost and dean of students at the University of Pittsburgh, talks about helping the entire campus community dream of ways to enhance the college experience.