Perceptions of Student Recruitment Information

We had an interesting conversation this morning around how the University markets itself to different learners.

We found that the recruitment of learners can be something that is the responsibility of a number of different stakeholders in the institution which can cause confusion over the message going out to potential students.

•  Faculty:  Award leader and or Link tutor (for partner colleges)
• Services: Marketing team, student recruitment or AimHigher. 

Each stakeholder perceives themselves as the data owners, thus when changes occur to the content they can feel that they have lost control of that information, or that information has been misinterpreted.

Issues around student marketing/recruitment start right at the beginning of course development as one of the first templates require staff to estimate student numbers for the award. Without support from marketing and student recruitment these numbers can be difficult to collate. Not only that but all award documentation for course design is focused on either faculty/senior management viewing or for Quality Assurance.Therefore to to promote awards to potential students there needs to be a change in language which means a duplication of effort in creating more materials - saying the same thing slightly differently!

There is an initiative in the university that is looking at bringing the efforts of student recruitment and AimHigher together, however there are some interesting holes in the processes around recruitment and marketing within the university. Some work is occurring with the Student Experience around this issue being done by Paul Baron, who we spoke to last week.  He is supporting investigating how we manage the product portfolio, how new markets are identified and how communication is managed between the university and prospective learners.

Faculty and Process Spokes - Feedback

UPDATED 2012-06

We have had another busy week here, talking to members of faculties, those reviewing processes in the University, and taking part in Annual Award Reviews. It all feeds into what we would like from Curriculum Design and Development.

An issue highlighted from interviews recently was around using templates for faculties in course design. There are a number of different course design templates that need completing, and even when training is provided they can still be interpreted and completed in a number of different ways.

UPDATE: By creating FLAG we are hoping some of these issues will be taken out of the equation, although we are still waiting for feedback on this, and there are some rather big changes expected in the near future around forms faculties will need to complete, these will be reflected in FLAG.
There are also some new spoke initiatives, Document Management, that will support how information is collected within a workflow. XCRI-CAP which is looking at what information is stored, how it is stored and inputted into existing systems. XCRI-CAP will be looking at creating a single source of truth of course information and therefore will be looking at the quality of information collected. The Student Systems Project is also looking at course information, and is working in tandem with the XCRI-CAP project team.

When asked for "blue sky" ideas we heard about:

•  personalised prospectus and website.

UPDATE: With the new XCRI-CAP project being run by Sam Scott this 'blue sky' thought is becoming closer to being a reality. Importantly Sam is working closely with the Enable team to understand the impact of her work, alongside that of other initiatives within the institution. In particular Sam is working on using ArchiMate models to communicate how this can happen and what can cause issues.

• experiences should be personal to those we are trying to engage

UPDATE: This fits with the new University Strategy and the Academic Plan, including focusing on graduate attributes. However at this time this hasn't been clarified completely, how are we going to do it? FLAG has been designed to ask the questions of course designers and gives some guidance on opportunities for personalisation of course delivery, however systems and information in the university still make this very difficult.

• and that the addition of negotiated modules onto traditional awards as options would be useful.

UPDATE: Recent restructuring of awards may make it possible in the future. Although there has been no mention of this particular goal in university documents, it does fit with personalisation of award delivery and design.

I have yet to have time to blog about last weeks training and conference work, but I am hoping I will get some time free soon to do that! Next week we have more interviews and we will be presenting to our first college partner HE Forum.

Investigations

I promised to write a bit about the project interviews, at the start of the week we spoke to Beebe about work in marketing around collecting course information from faculties and then delivering that to both perspective learners and to existing learners, at the time they were investigating using Blackboard as a source, however since we meet she is now thinking about the problems around duplicating data silos and also about not linking new data to what already exists in the university. This linked to the fact that she had not been aware that courses could also be delivered at colleges, and in these cases they could use either Blackboard or their own VLE. We were also able to tell her about the repository work that is going on in the university that could be used to help her. She was able to tell us about another initiative she is working on, around the university intranet "MyPortal" and looking about providing learners with more personalised information. We have been invited to the next two meetings around these areas.
We also spoke to Mike from Faculty in Computing, Engineering and Technology (FCET), about his negotiated learning award. This was very interesting as this is a programme of awards from undergraduate to post graduate that has been designed with an employer. It has successfully gone through validation but due to managing resources within faculties there is limited resources available to run new awards at this time of the year, although the employer wanted to start delivery the day after validation.
Further converstations this week included one with another member of FCET, who was speaking about their internal investigation into looking at Distance Learning, marketing of awards, and internationalisation of delivery. He was experiences issues around trying to change staff attitudes to delivery and how we, as a university, deal with marketing courses in other countries. He did say that the faculty was very proud of its ability to support work based learning and work placements, and that they were interested in taking this further with their distance learning.