It is now three years since we launched the Education Strategy 2016-21.  The strategy is underpinned by the belief that during their time at UCL our students should experience directly the world-class research of academics and researchers so that they too understand the uncertainty at the boundaries of knowledge, become knowledge creators themselves, and build the skills they need to excel in their future careers.

Half way through, now is a good point to take stock of what has been achieved and look at what lies ahead for the next two years.

Personalising student support

We have improved how we help new students to settle in and organise their first few weeks. In its first year of operation, the Welcome to UCL app, with checklists for every stage of arrival and details of more than 1405 induction events, was downloaded more than 15,000 times and used by more than 70% of students  Our personal tutoring handbooks and digital resources explain the purpose and function of personal tutoring to students and staff, helping them to get the most out of their meetings.

Further work to support the transition to UCL life is underway.  The Transition Programme, where small groups of first-year undergraduate students are mentored on all aspects of university life by second years, is being reviewed to create more structured guidance for mentors, with a focus on how to get the most out of lectures and seminars, and how to use assessment and feedback effectively. This autumn we will be piloting our Introductory Programme, a new on-line programme that introduces offer-holders to UCL’s interdisciplinary approach and to new ways of thinking and enables them to explore our campus and connect with other students before they arrive.

And we are improving the way we support our students once they are here. We’ll be launching the Academic Communication Centre (ACC) in September 2019. The ACC will work directly with students to support their academic writing, and support programme leads to integrate academic writing into the taught curriculum. Later this month we are producing a comprehensive Module Catalogue, a significant step towards a much more positive experience of module choice and registration for students and staff alike. This has been made possible by improvements to our student records system – the result of intense prolonged collaboration between Academic Services and departments.

Our new Student Success Platform will join up the support we offer to our students: askUCL, a new enquiry management system where staff and students can raise and track enquiries, streamlining referral processes; and a personal tutoring support system that enables staff and students to manage their interactions, arranging and logging meetings and making referrals for specific support. Our new Student Health and Wellbeing Strategy aims to embed a university-wide approach to health and wellbeing so that our students can be successful and enjoy their time at UCL.

We want every student to achieve their full potential so we are working hard to make education at UCL  inclusive. Departmental colleagues have been using the Inclusive Curriculum Health Check to identify areas where their programmes and programme delivery could be made more inclusive. And through our BME Attainment Project, we are recruiting and training students to act as consultants to work with staff to develop their curricula with broader representation of thought and approaches, beyond the traditional euro-centric western canon.

Putting research and enquiry at the heart of learning

We introduced the Connected Curriculum, UCL’s framework for integrating a research-based education into all our taught programmes. It is a tool to prompt discussion about curricula to ensure our students get the most from what UCL has to offer.  In 2017-18, our departments benchmarked their programmes to find out the extent to which they reflected these dimensions. There is a growing bank of case studies on the UCL Teaching and Learning Portal that showcase the ways in which colleagues are developing the different dimensions of the Connected Curriculum into their modules and programmes.

There’s been an acceleration in the award of HEA Fellowships, thanks to the work of the Arena Centre for Research-based Education, and earlier this year Anil Doshi from the School of Management was the 1,000^th UCL colleague to achieve Fellowship through the Arena Programme. But professional development doesn’t stop there. Every year more than 400 staff attend UCL Education Conference, for a programme packed with presentations by colleagues sharing their innovative practice and research.

Improving assessment and feedback

Our students continue to tell us that the way we are supporting their learning and evaluating their progress needs to get better.  There is no silver bullet here and we have been tackling this problem through a number of different initiatives. To ensure fairness and maintain academic standards, we have introduced a single set of academic regulations for all taught programmes, with more supportive progression regulations and clear classification regulations and algorithms.  The new regulations support staff to develop and make use of a variety of forms of assessment – we know that diversity in assessment is vital for inclusion. Our Assessment Review continues, and UCL Arena Centre will soon start to work with departments to audit their assessments, using a methodology known as TESTA which has had proven impact elsewhere in the sector.  We have also developed more print and online resources to help our students make the most of their assessment and feedback, as well as drawing their attention to processes such as Extenuating Circumstances and Condonement.

The experience for our students has been improved by the move to a single modern facility at ExcelLondon. Thanks to system and process improvements, the Exam Timetable now has an earlier publication date in February and we have rolled out Late Summer Assessments across the university, so that our students can take deferred exams or resits without having to wait until the following year.

Developing student engagement and leadership

So that we can gather feedback from our students, we have overhauled the student survey cycle, introducing PTES, New to UCL and Student Experience Survey (for penultimate year undergraduates), and dropping the Student Barometer. We are now working on making the results of these surveys accessible through Tableau, so that staff can delve into the data and work out priority areas for improvement. In the three years since its launch, our Student Experience Panel has grown to 1100 active participants, providing another way of gathering student perspectives and feedback on issues outside of their programmes.

UCL ChangeMakers, our scheme that brings students and staff together to work on projects to enhance education within departments, is being scaled up to give students the opportunity to collaborate on projects of institution-wide impact.

Our current Student Voice project is reviewing how student voices shape our decision making and how we can make students more active participants in the process of improvement. Currently there are many different ways in which students are asked to evaluate the modules they have studied. We are scoping a Module Evaluation Platform with a view to harmonise module evaluation across the university, to improve the experience for our students and to provide more useful data and insight.

Preparing students for the workplace and the world

We have introduced annual careers registration for all undergraduate and postgraduate taught students In the first year, 96% of new and returning students completed careers registration, giving us extremely valuable data, so that we can provide targeted support, reaching those students who would benefit from intensive careers advice at a much earlier stage. So that UCL Careers can give effective support to recent graduates and enhance graduate outcomes, an Exit Survey for graduating students is being developed. In particular, the data will enable us to identify which students are at risk of leaving without having secured their next opportunity.

Our Global Internships Programme encourages UCL students to undertake an international summer internship during their time at university, offering internship opportunities, funding and advice on working overseas.

Enriching digital learning

We have invested £2.5m in audio visual facilities across the campus and continue to enable Lecturecast across our teaching estate. Early adopters of Reflect, our blogging platform for staff and students, are enthusiastic about its potential to enhance teaching and learning.

We keep how we want to teach and learn under constant review so that we can continue to design an online environment to support changing pedagogic and social approaches as well as taking advantage of rapidly advancing technology. We will work closely with academic colleagues to meet increasing demand for good online content to support digital learning. And compliance with new accessibility legislation will ensure that all content on our digital estate is inclusive.

Creating a teaching estate to meet our needs

When we launched the Education Strategy in 2016 there was an acute shortage of teaching and learning spaces that was seriously diminishing the experience for students and staff alike.  Three years on there is still much to do but much has been achieved.  In 2016-17 alone, we increased the number of study spaces by 15% and through Transforming UCL increased teaching seat capacity by 23%, as well as refurbishing significant buildings such as Bentham House, home to the Faculty of Laws, and creating Wilkins Terrace, a new outdoor social space at the heart of the Bloomsbury Campus.

We have made operational improvements to the timetable and introduced a system that tells students where they can find free study spaces. There is still more work to be done on timetabling but it is possible to see how improved module choice with the new module catalogue, earlier module registration, better systems and higher quality management information will enable us to make much-needed further progress in the medium term.

A personal highlight has been the recent opening of the Student Centre.  Five years in planning and build, this was conceived in partnership with our students and reflects our commitment not only to them, but also to world-class architecture, construction and sustainability.  Being really high quality and with students at its heart, it is the physical embodiment of everything that we have been seeking to achieve through the Education Strategy.

Evolving the culture

We have been working hard to raise the status of education at UCL, to secure parity of esteem for the work of our educators and those who support them. In 2018 we introduced the Academic Career Framework, which enables recognition and reward for teaching activity and encourages innovation and education leadership.

So as we enter the next phase of the Education Strategy, thank you to everyone who has helped to get us this far. We are making great progress. The many initiatives to improve and develop our practice, processes, systems and facilities will all help in this next phase, but most of all it will be your continuing dedication to our students that will make the crucial difference.  And for that I thank you very much indeed.

Our students have many opportunities to make their voices heard, so why don’t they think we’re acting on their feedback?

Our Student Engagement team can help you tell your students how they are driving change.

 

At the heart of what we are doing is the idea of students as partners – a key principle that we wrote into UCL2034 and followed through in the Education Strategy 2016- 21.

This was developed through wide-reaching consultation with students as well as staff, and is predicated on working in partnership with our students towards our objectives of all students having a stretching and challenging education and a fulfilling experience to prepare them for the next stage in their careers.

What does partnership look like?

Our partnerships with students take many forms and I am proud of all the ways that have been established – at department, faculty and institution level – to enable our students to make their voices heard and create real and lasting change for them and their successors. We know that such engagement is a positive influence on the quality of their experience at UCL.

Students’ Union UCL and Student Academic Representatives: we work closely with the elected Sabbatical Officers and staff of the UCL Students’ Union. The Students’ Union trains and inspires more than 1,350 Student Academic Representatives, who work at department and faculty level to represent the opinions and ideas of their undergraduate and postgraduate classmates.

Every department has a Student Staff Consultative Committee (SSCC), where staff and student representatives meet at least termly to discuss issues raised by students and come up with solutions.

Student surveys and consultations: students are given the opportunity to reflect on many aspects of their experience of UCL at different points during their time here through our institutional surveys, New to UCL, Student Experience Survey, National Student Survey, PTES [link to Annual Survey Cycle].

Our students give more specific feedback about their academic experience through module evaluation and work is underway to buy a new system to reduce the administrative burden on departments of running these surveys.

Student Experience Panel and focus groups: students are recruited to focus groups for consultation on initiatives to make the student experience better, for example, ensuring that regulations around exams and extenuating circumstances are clear and fair, or asking students for their feedback on how UCL handles enquiries and questions about access to services.

Our thousand-strong Student Experience Panel gives feedback through surveys, workshops or user-testing on anything from the design of new print material to the key message of a campaign. Find out more about working with the Student Experience Panel or how to submit a request on the Teaching and Learning portal.

Active engagement: as ChangeMakers, Arena Student Fellows and Student Reviewers, our students collaborate with staff across the university to improve the student experience (for example, reviewing and replacing a key textbook with an alternative, more accessible option for the Psychology with Education BSc programme, establishing a dissertation ‘mixer’ event for third year students to help prepare second years on the BA Geography programme and the development of the UCL ChangeMaker Guides to Assessment and Feedback.)

Poor NSS score for Student Voice

In spite of the mechanisms that are in place, we perform poorly on the ‘Student Voice’ measure in the National Student Survey.  In 2018 we scored 68%, compared with the sector average of 73%. Look more closely at the three questions that combine to create this score, and it is clear where the problem lies.

• 84% of our students agree that they have had the right opportunities to provide feedback on their course – here we are absolutely in line with the sector.
• But only 69% of our students agree that staff value students’ views and opinions about the course
• And, worryingly, only just over half our students (51%) agree with the statement ‘It is clear how students’ feedback on the course has been acted on’.

Across UCL in recent years you have made a tremendous number of positive changes. So why don’t our students think we’re listening? Perhaps because we aren’t communicating that change effectively.

This matters. First, because that’s how successful partnerships work – if you work alongside students to make change, if you consult them about the way you do things, then part of the partnership process is to tell them how they’ve made a difference.

Second, closing the loop helps you to measure the impact of the changes you’ve made – if you’ve acted on what your students are telling you and your students can see the difference, then they’ll let you know through surveys and more informal feedback.

Third, the metrics matter to our reputation. In 2020 we will make our subject-level submission to the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF). One of the metrics that will be used to measure the quality of a UCL education will be the Student Voice metric of NSS.

How can you tell your students about change?

We have just appointed Professor Deborah Gill as UCL’s first Pro Vice-Provost (Student Experience) and engaging with students is key to her role. Early in the New Year, Professor Gill and our Head of Student Engagement, Sally Mackenzie, will be meeting with departments to understand local challenges and identify ways that my office can offer support to communicate the changes that have been driven by your students.

There are several ways to do this:

• Conduct a ‘You Shape UCL’ campaign in your department. Use the templates produced by our Student Engagement Team (Read ‘How have students shaped your department or faculty? Let them know through ‘You Shaped UCL 2018’)
• Share the work of your Student Staff Consultative Committee with your students, so that they all feel they have a stake in it (Read the new case study on UCL Teaching and Learning Portal about how revitalising UCL Geography’s Staff Student Consultative Committee resulted in a 9% rise in NSS ‘student voice’ score in one year)
• Share with all your departmental colleagues the details of those changes, so that they can act as advocates with their students.
• Hold student experience events or forums for staff and students to meet and talk about changes or key issues in the department.

Celebrate positive change

We are privileged to be able to attract such talented students to UCL and we must make the most of the opportunities to benefit from their ideas to improve the education we offer.

And finally, communicating the positive changes gives us the opportunity to thank all the students and staff who are making a difference and shaping UCL for the better.

The National Student Survey (NSS) – the annual survey of all undergraduate students in their final year of study – is now open and we are actively encouraging all eligible students to complete it.

The NSS has been with us since 2006 and it has become the single most persuasive driver for education change in UK universities. The feedback we get from our students completing the NSS is enormously valuable. While it doesn’t tell the whole story of what is happening across UCL, NSS scores and comments are the most listened-to voice of our undergraduate students. They help us to prioritise investment in the people, systems and facilities we need to improve their education. (more…)

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