In pursuing its aspiration to be a sector leader in student experience and student success, UTS has continued to embed the Student Experience Framework (SEF) into operations in 2024. To this end, a new team has been established within the DVCES portfolio to drive student experience improvements across UTS. The team’s focus is strategic projects and initiatives – aligned with the SEF – that improve processes, systems and experiences, with the overall goal of supporting our students’ success.
I’m delighted to join UTS to lead the team as the Director of Student Experience. During my 12-year tenure at Western Sydney University, I worked in student experience, took on the role of Director of Student Retention and Success, and led the development and implementation of the innovative Western Success (peer-to-peer advising) program. Joining me in the team is Ruby Seaward as the Senior Programs Communication Adviser and Natalie Kim, Operations Coordinator – Student Experience. An Evaluation Specialist role is soon to be recruited, and there are plans to bring other roles into the team to support the Orientation and Onboarding project.
Spring support for students
One of our first initiatives has been coordinating the Spring Support for Students Outreach campaign, with a focus on collaboration with faculties and key divisional stakeholders. There were two key components to this campaign.
1. SMS nudges for LMS engagement
The first involved an SMS prompt to students studying in Spring session who had not engaged with their Canvas (LMS) site by the end of the first week of classes. This nudge is a relatively simple intervention. It helped us identify disengaged students early and get them back on track with engagement.
This simple text prompt saw a big spike in engagement with 34% of students contacted engaging with the LMS within 48 hours of the nudge. Ideally, we would automate this type of intervention so that it is triggered early in each teaching session.
2. Calls for support
The second component of the Spring outreach campaign involved calls to students reattempting subjects in Spring. This would ensure they were aware of the many support services available to help them to succeed.
In this campaign, our outreach team made 2 call attempts to some 2500 students and had conversations with over 700 students (a connection rate of just over 25%), making more than 500 referrals to support services such as HELPS and Counselling or connecting them with a U:PASS session or even with their Subject Coordinator..
There is an opportunity for us to really start to leverage the rich data that we have, such as behavioural and experiential data. In personalising our outreach to students, we can make data-driven interventions at the pivotal moments in the student journey.
Making onboarding less overwhelming
A big focus for the team this year is finding ways to optimise the orientation and onboarding experience for students. This can leverage the significant human-centred design work undertaken last year in collaboration with staff and students.
In this research, commencing students told us they were excited to join our community and start their learning journey at UTS, but they also reported that they found their onboarding experiences complicated, confusing and overwhelming. We’ll be exploring how we can better curate this early experience to deliver the most relevant information at the most appropriate time. Reducing the cognitive load for students will go some way toward eliminating friction and overwhelm from the onboarding process.
Future focus areas
We are aiming to work collaboratively with you on some exciting projects in the coming months. Together, we can develop a body of work and action plan that everyone can connect with and contribute to. Our team will soon be:
- working with students to co-design a new Student Voice Framework that provides timely feedback on student satisfaction with and ease of access to University services; this includes actionable insights into their experiences with systems, policy and processes across the student lifecycle
- working with staff and students to develop a Student Experience Action Plan that prioritises projects and initiatives that will have the greatest impact on improving student experience and student success
- developing a Student Experience Evaluation Framework to help us measure the impact that these initiatives and activities are having on improving student experience (as reflected through the four key pillars of the SEF – academic engagement, belonging, wellbeing and partnerships); this will help us to ensure that time and resources are allocated to the most impactful initiatives.
We look forward to working with you to deliver even better experiences for our students.