COVID-19 and beyond: understanding student expectations

Professor Roger Lewis, YU Associate

At this time of year prospective students gear up for university. Amidst the uncertainty, 2020 might be no exception despite some of the current thinking. What, in the current climate are students expecting in September? Anecdotal evidence suggests that ‘the student experience’ (i.e. ‘being at uni’) is the first thought of many. It’s always been a moot point as to how far their provider’s responsibility extends into that wider area so let’s focus on specifically educational provision. Last week’s 2020 HEPI/Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey offers some initial insights at a time of the lockdown period.

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HEPI, LEO and VFM

Monika Antal, Executive Manager

Last week I attended the Hepi Annual Conference in London. Sam Gyimah MP, Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, opened the event with a keynote speech that focused on value for money, innovation and transparency.

The minister began by calling on universities to “focus relentlessly on value for money”. By value for money, the assumption was that value for money should be measured, in part, by graduate earnings, which just happened to be the subject of a new report published the same day by the Institute for Fiscal Studies/Department for Education looking at relative labour market returns to undergraduate degrees, and which draws heavily upon Longitudinal Educational Outcomes (LEO) data.

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Digital Storytelling for ‘hard to reach’ students

Digital storytelling can be a powerful tool for capturing student voices, especially those which seek to challenge a norm or prevailing culture. They can raise awareness of the differences experienced by students pre-HE, through transition and induction, on feelings of confidence, and of the challenges faced in retention and progression.

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