Making a Differ(ence)

In the summer of 2020 we felt the pandemic had created the need for an online space for incoming students.

The purpose of this was to recreate the physical space for our incoming students which they were initially going to miss out on at the start of their studies that September.

We wanted to create a student-led space that encouraged members to ask questions with confidence and help their sense of belonging. After some research we partnered with the Edubots project to pilot the ‘Differ Chat’ app with our students.

We recruited Digital Student Mentors (DSMs) to monitor the space and share their experiences. When incoming students joined the app we encouraged them to interact with the different features of the app such as icebreakers and creating communities.

Following the success of the use of the Differ Chat app in 2020 we decided to use it again in 2021, but develop the project using what we had learned in the previous year.

Getting started and making improvements

In April 2021 we recruited more DSMs and we were lucky enough to have a couple of people involved that had used the app before. This helped us to shape the development of the project by drawing on their expertise.

Improving students’ confidence with and knowledge of the app this time was really important to us — following feedback we’d received that it was sometimes confusing — so we created an online guide to try and help them with this. The guide was viewed 373 times during the period of use. We sent it to students when they were invited to join the app and also sent invites via SMS to try and increase the proportion of students joining from what it had been the previous year.

We decided to invite students to join the app earlier this time around, following their participation in our ‘Kickstart’ pre-entry skills programme. We hoped this would give them more time to ask questions and feel settled and prepared for the start of their course. From April 2021 we started to see students joining the space, interacting with each other and asking questions of the DSMs.

How did it go?

The app was a bit quieter over the summer months than we had expected, but when we invited the last groups of students and the start of term began to draw closer things started to pick up.

We had learned that new students really valued using Differ Chat for making those initial connections with their peers, and it was lovely to see this working in one of our Foundation Year communities with everyone planning where to meet each other in the first week of their induction.

We invited 144 students to 5 different course communities and 106 students joined. This was a much better joining rate than the previous year, so the additional SMS messages seemed to have made a difference.

Similarly to in 2020 we found that mature students (aged 21+) enjoyed using Differ Chat more than standard age students (aged 18–20). Mature students told us that they liked having something that’s separate to their personal life, but moved to WhatsApp for things like group work and video calls.

During the first week of using the app we asked students to answer a question to get a sense of how they were finding things.

The Differ Chat app is…

As we predicted the app was again busiest in the first couple of weeks of term and then went quiet, apart from with students on our part-time Preparation for Higher Education (PHE) programme who for the second year running continued to use the app for the entire first semester and beyond.

Our end of project survey gave us similar feedback to the previous pilot, in that students sometimes found the app confusing and couldn’t follow the chat thread.

Most people who completed the survey did say the app increased their sense of belonging however, with one commenting: “I think it’s great! It allows you to be part of a university community even when studying online”

The future

We have learned a lot using Differ Chat and can definitely see the benefits of using an online student-led platform for students about to start their studies. Our students have appreciated having a safe space to ask questions and connect with each other outside of the classroom, and like having something that’s just for university life separate to WhatsApp, Facebook and other social media.

That being said, the additional features that originally attracted us to Differ Chat — such as the icebreakers, the ability to create communities and the asking a question function — were used either rarely or not at all. Students also talked about how much they would like a voice or video call feature, which is available on other platforms.

We are, therefore, taking some time to reflect on what we’ve learned before deciding which online student-led platform to use next academic year.

If you’d like to find out more about our experiences using Differ Chat please don’t hesitate to contact me.