Don’t trust students
Or should we? Putting students in charge of technology could be risky business…
In the UK, universities have long been consulting their students on strategies for improving their IT offer through surveys and focus groups. But across education, there’s been a change in recent years. Terms like co-creator, designer and partner have replaced the old language of ‘customer’. Institutions have moved from seeing the student as a user to be listened to, to a partner in technology and organisational design.
The shifting sands of student influence?
For the second year running, UK education’s technology charity Jisc, are organising a competition inviting students to come up with innovative solutions to their everyday challenges, then mentoring them through the process from design to roll-out. Universities like Manchester and Oxford Brookes now run app-creating contests, while entrants for open competitions like Google’s summer of code are often students or new start-ups.
During the 2013 competition, many teams came up with ‘magic bullets’ to improve their learning experiences, such as a web app to help visualise progress through the academic year. But some also voiced surprising concerns, including how to virtualise noticeboards, and improve in-classroom lecture technology — things that the sector might have thought they’d already got right. Jisc programme manager Paul Bailey explained: “Students are anticipating future concerns. They’re already four or five years ahead — using models like gamification, or the concept of the virtual assistant.”
“When you ask students what technology they want to see in their institutions, it’s rarely what you expect.” Andy McGregor, deputy chief innovation officer at Jisc.
At the University of Greenwich a team of students have been developing their own virtual learning environment. TheStudentVLE.com is a social and academic hub encouraging peer-to-peer learning via a PC, mobile or tablet. Some of the ventures like Call for Participants, a crowd-sourced platform to help researchers find volunteers, are already successfully operating independently.
BUT WE ALSO NEED TO GET IT RIGHT.
But there’s a reason, too, why students sometimes aren't consulted. There are often reasons not to change services that learners won’t see. Behind the scenes lurk inertia, status quoism and politics. Undergraduates in particular may lack the market knowledge to weigh up potential solutions or come up with anything really innovative — but where there are calls for a piece of technology that the university already offers, that can also be a sign that there’s a real market for it and it may simply need to be communicated differently to make it more appealing to the student body.
James Clay from the University of Gloucestershire said at the Future of Technology in Education event, “Students don’t necessarily know what they need or what they want. It’s not just about listening to learners but also giving them an opportunity to answer this question: what do you want to do, not what do you want?”
A win-win situation?
Nevertheless, the benefits of putting students at the heart of tech decision making are obvious: switched-on, engaged students; a university that knows what its users want, and up-to-date technology. People who see services from bottom-up are often quicker than staff at identifying problems, and by applying themselves to solving them, those learners gain skills valued by future employers.
Sometimes, it seems, students are the best people to answer their own questions.
From the May/June issue of Education Technology. Article written by Nicola Yeeles.
ET is a bi-monthly publication free to read, download and digest. Available in print, online page turner and across iOS/Android/Windows 8 devices as an App.
Sign up to receive the latest news in edtech and updates, insights, interviews and more.
