Why Student Experience is a key to Student Success?

Does the above question raise an eyebrow or bring a frown to your face? Being heads in your higher education, we know how crucial is your role in maintaining student experience. After all, your ultimate mission is to elevate students to a new level and to help them achieve their goals.

We know, maintaining student experience invariably results in student success and paves way for institutional effectiveness.

Would you prefer to take a chance here? This blog throws insights on why student experience is crucial to student success and how maintaining a balance here adds to your institutional success.

What is the student experience?

The concept began with the students being given access to the wealth of your institutional information, thanks to the rise of smart technology in the classrooms.

In simple words, the student experience is all about “Listening to the students’ voice and giving them what they most need in terms of preferences, digital provision, expectations, interactions for a more fruitful learning and education”. 

It is offering a personalized experience that’s tailor-made suiting their needs, wants, interests, and their preferred method of communication, which only technology could offer. 

Now, this Student Experience starts as early pre-admissions and continues beyond becoming alumni. It comprises the following key elements:

Straightening out these areas will ultimately result in student success and institutional excellence. 

What are the factors that contribute to Student Experience?

1. Streamlined Student Communication

This is the heart and spine of Student Experience. Students expect multi-way communication across campus, through multiple devices and platforms. The mobile phone is their favorite way, of course!

According to a recent News 18, 30 Jan 2020 report, the Smartphone Users in India Crossed 500 Million in 2019.
Another research by ORFonlineorg predicts India to have 859 million smartphones and 504 million users by 2022.

Having a higher education software with an app’s instant messaging features is what they most expect for instant, two-way, and direct communication. To students, phone calls and emails are simply too slow.

Your institution should gear up delighting an applicant instantly right from the moment he/she places an inquiry for courses, with relevant, personalized information. Remember, it should be engaging communication. 

The same pace must continue after their enrollment. A good communication technology on their hands can provide a way for quick, effective, and efficient method of communication, and access all opportunities to enhance their student experience.

Those personalized, push notifications directed to students, allowing one-to-one or group communication, in real-time adds to the student experience that today’s student community most deserves.

2. Enhancing the student experience through constant feedback and assessment.

Students like being electronically tracked of their progress. That instant feedback based on their assessment gives them opportunities to improve continuously.

There is more interaction this way, giving the students chances to improve continuously.

A student-centric software is a must here. Something that provides complete student lifecycle management by tracking students’ progress toward completion of their pedagogical goals by tracking program, outcomes, and course performance is a must here. 

3. Track and Measure students’ activities

One of the main reasons for students to drop out is disengagement or detachment from studies. Missing classes, late submissions, and other tardiness are some of the early activities that could be snipped to prevent real difficulties, later on. Yes, it is challenging to keep track of every student’s performance, but it is possible with an Conduct Management System in place.

Such digital advancements give faculty enough tools to track students’ progress, reduce graduation rates, and give the necessary support, especially for “at-risk” students.

4. Build student experience with a student portfolio in place

An SIS with a student portfolio feature is all that it takes to boost the student experience. 
 
With an effective student portfolio in place, they get to mirror their performance online, with real-time access to assessment and progress data. 
 
With students having an option to house all their digital artifacts including projects, term papers, case studies, faculty assessment criteria, course-specific learning outcomes, and with faculty having space to post comments, followed by continuous improvement, students’ knowledge and experience expand. 

This sort of e-track paves way for a more positive learner outcome with students having the option to have real-time access to monitor progress, receive personalized feedback to move forward. Student Portfolios come in handy for students to share their achievements with their future employers too.

5. Efficient administration and management build Student Experience 

The next big thing that contributes to the student experience is having efficient administration and management. Student Information Systems of today take a 360degree control of student lifecycle from the inquiry stage till they become an Alumni.

Enabling Online Enrolment can make management quicker and more efficient.

Online enrolment with a taste of cloud-based CRM for education not only increases the number of students wanting to enroll but also keeps them engaged and happy. It enables institutions to harness and analyze their data for insight into how to continuously improve services for better student relationships. 

6. Achieve student satisfaction with an effective SIS

Adult learners, millennials, and first-generation students seek flexible educational delivery opportunities to reshape how their credentials are earned.

Hence, a rigid legacy system cannot fit into the place. Today’s digital natives arrive on campus with their set of “connected devices”.

They wish to manage their entire student journey on the device of their choice. Right from financial aids, student advising, course planning, to course registrations, they wish for everything to be managed, on the go! What is crucial here is an efficient Student Information System that gives students the long-term success that they mostly ask for.

Most of the student’s activities become easy with the Student Information System. All that students are expected to do is to pull out their phones, check their class schedules, understand the locations, meeting times, and course details. 
 
There is a centralized location from where students could retrieve all their information for the smooth running of the course, including schedules, room changes, course changes, assignment deadlines, fees due to dates, etc all of which can be intimated through a mobile app. Registrations are made easy. 

7. Provide Online Forums for a unique student experience

Elevate student experience by providing online forums, building student societies, communities, and networks. This expands learning opportunities beyond classroom space, widening socializing and extracurricular interests.
If you may ask why there are reasons;

Today’s Gen Y’s look for active social life and opportunities to socialize. They welcome social media to complement their “student experience”. While open social media in education can get quite risky with inefficient security and monitoring, building responsible social networks should be possible by digital transformation. 

At Creatrix Campus, we have private social networks integrated into SIS and LMS, which are accessible via an app. Designed to operate just like any other social network, students get the top-most experience to network and study.
It broadly reflects in two ways;

(i) The Institution to Students --- The institutions can reach out to students, even before their fellow students could, giving them a more connected experience from day one. There is an exchange of events and social activities that happens across campus, directing a learner-centered approach.

(ii) Faculty with Students --- Streamlines the connections between the faculty and students, allowing both to connect, collaborate, and communicate. All this, without affecting the personal lives of both. There’s a positive learning space that allows discussion of various topics including extracurricular activities/societies.

We help cultivate a sense of support right from student recruitment, admissions, to retention. Throughout the student journey, we are by your side, improving the way data is gathered, collated, analyzed, shared, and acted on. Thus, empowering the institution, faculty, and the students with what they most deserve towards attaining their goals. 
 

8. Constant Engagement with Alumni

On stepping into your institution, students expect a non-stop journey through and over to graduation. Having an alumni network in place will help you track students’ success, personally and professionally, which is what even most students expect from you. 
Graduates who are successful in their professional front are the most valuable brand ambassadors a university or a college can ask for.

Therefore engage them. Set up events and avenues to interlock with alumni, keep them involved in curriculum development, ideations, mentorship programs, fundraising, etc. After all, they are the most influential people of your alma mater.

9. Influence Student Experience with a well-knit support and mentor system

Next on high priority in student agenda is student support and student advising or mentorship. It’s high time the higher education institutions embrace opportunities for pastoral care for an “overall student experience.”

This will reduce student anxiety about failing in exams. Insightful data about the assessment and assignment help identify potential ‘at-risk’ students even at the early stage and generate warnings to prevent them from being ‘off-track’, later on. They are assigned to individual mentors, which helps them stay focused and improve their grades.

10. Listen to the student voice for an ultimate student experience

What ultimately matters in today’s higher education is a channel to listen to the voice of the student. But that’s ironically the most missed out one. 

Voicing out their opinions through surveys and course evaluations gives students a unique experience that most students crave for. 

Not most educational institutions around the world have efficient frameworks when it comes to collecting students’ concerns. 

Most of the time, either the student’s voice is neglected or there are no standardized tools for evaluating teaching and institutional effectiveness with clear-cut policies. It is high time institutions start realizing the need to capture the student voice through market research, including surveys and focus groups. 

With a full-fledged Course Evaluation software in place, a fair evaluation happens where students get to voice out their opinions seamlessly, right from their mobile devices with instant feedback. They get to be judgemental about the way learning and teaching happen, course load, faculty performance, financial aid, institutional performance, etc. 

Conclusion

Students are constantly looking for engaging ways to improve their experience from their start to the endpoint. Delivering a unique student experience has become an indispensable duty of higher eds to empower today's students. Do you have provisions to support the student experience?

We can help you here. With Creatrix SIS, we manage the entire student lifecycle from pre-admissions to graduation, enhancing the student experience at every step. Contact us or request a demo.