Do you know how your Students feel?

I mean: Do you know how they really feel about their degrees?

I found this page on Facebook, it had 21,100 fans (far more than many degree related pages), and many of the comments on it were about exam stress, a lack of engagement in subject matter AND most concerningly a view that the degree is lacking in value.

This should be a wake up call for all those who value and care about higher education. It is not a sufficient response to say “Bah Students are never satisfied!” -  and I am sure that there will be those who will remark in this way.

The key, to my mind is to understand what underlies these negative thoughts and rather than brushing them off. To seek to challenge ourselves as providers, supporters and advocates of tertiary education to understand them.

The idea that “We shall build it and they will come” was appropriate previously but in the current and future digital environment where students link up via tools such as friendfeed, facebook and twitter, and have access to more information on courses and universities than institutions could possibly marshall, there is a need to understand the needs of the student body in terms of learning style and engagement.

In no way do we advocate the simplification of subjects, materials or the intellectual challenge which are key reasons why we study what we study. It is our responsibility to understand how technology can be adopted and adapted, not just through the use of Virtual Learning Environments or ejournal platforms, but fundamentally into how courses are designed, presented and assessed.

The approach (and this, to us at Reference Tree, is non-negotiable) must hold the concept of reading for a degree as an intellectual and academic exploration of a subject at its core. Studying the why leads to enhanced understanding and new techniques and approaches, studying the how leads to repetition and perhaps some refinement.

Within the UK Higher Education space there are frustrations, and pages such as this one provide an insight into the thoughts of students about their course as they happen rather than after the fact proxy analysis based on exam results.

Our suggestion is to not only rely on satisfaction surveys or polls but to ask the question “Do we really know the level of engagement of students on their courses?” and answer it through supplementing formal attitudinal research with the less formal, more freeflowing and in many cases more accurate attitude barometers represented by the page above.