Where Are Your Students At Conferences?
While walking through the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, I saw vendors selling their technology solutions to faculty and administrators who are leading the discovery of these tools to make a decision with their respective groups. But where were the students, the ones who are also involved in technology decisions and the most common end users of these tools?
As a former student government leader, I was heavily involved in conversations with university administration about tuition, funding, events, resources, programs and more. We collaborated with administrators on most, if not all areas of the university. But when it came to learning technology, it seemed like students were left out of the fold. This continues to be the case at universities across the country. I think this is merely a lack of awareness from the student-end of what they need to know, why its important to get students involved early-on and how they can help to drive change at your school. If student leaders were more aware of how this impacts their learning experience, students would be able to help make a more informed decision about the platforms at their school and help to drive faculty and their campus to create a better learning experience for all.
To help drive better student involvement in conferences and your technology decision making process, you’ll want to try these tips.
1) Create a student board for feedback
The first task you can do is to meet with your student leaders on your campus regularly. Involve them in the demonstrations of new products. Have them provide feedback on products for classrooms or even learning management systems. Take advantage of the students on your campus that are talented with software and understand what applications are useful and which are just not.
Ask your student leaders important questions related to their technology experience on campus and regarding current platform usage. It’s important to understand the end-user experience to help solve the core issues on your campus. Utilize these student leaders to fully understand the student needs. And by understanding their needs, you’ll be able to have them help you drive change through classrooms more effectively.
By bringing students into the fold and into your decision making process early-on, you’ll be able to gather valuable insight on what current and future students are wanting in learning platforms. Which can open up new opportunities for platforms that better suit your school.
2) Include students in the discovery process
You’ll want to empower your student leaders to help you in the discovery process for learning tools and why it’s important to help. Students can be more effective in providing feedback early on in the process rather than later on when tools are already selected. What this will do is help improve decision making across the board for your institution. It will help your team assess what students like or dislike when it comes to learning tools and what functionality will actually be utilized by the students when a tool is implemented. Early feedback in the discovery process is important so you can assess which tools to bring into your RFP process. Without the feedback, you can easily be assessing the wrong tools for your campus without knowing it. Students can help you realize what things you are missing and bring up important factors to the student experience when vendors are talking with you about their products.
3) Involve students in designing your Request for Proposal (RFP)
Are you asking the right questions in your RFP today that help to drive better tools for your students? Students make up a vast majority of your users on a platform and many of the problems faculty have are student-related. By having students get involved early on in the discovering process, you can help solve the root of the problems with your learning platforms. Students can ask the hard questions to vendors about the user experience, design, mobility, etc. They may provide insight into questions you may have never thought of. Without actually living through the learning experience today, it’s hard to relate with it. Having a voice for the students present in the building of an RFP is crucial to helping your bottom-line. You’ll be wishing you had done this sooner!
4) Bring your student leaders to conferences
Once your students are heavily involved in the discovery process, it now makes sense to bring them to conferences. When you bring your end-users to a conference it can make a big impact. Students use these platforms on a daily basis, so their feedback can be instrumental in opening up your mind to what’s best for the campus. Remember, on average, 95% of your users are students. If you want to improve student engagement, retention or the university experience, you’ll need to get that feedback from the end-users themselves. And if faculty are attending your conferences, it’s a no-brainer to bring your students there as well.
Sure, you can be more experienced than students, and have more knowledge about the learning designs or competency-based approaches. But, you need to get first-hand knowledge of how your users are utilizing your learning platforms. What’s working and what’s not? And are you currently experiencing what your students are going through with using these platforms? If not, you need to ask your end-users, and it all starts with students.
I can say from my experience as a student leader, I understood the problems when I was a freshman living through using learning management systems. I was heavily involved in student government and was able to advocate for a better learning system early on in my college career. If I can do that, any student or leader on campus can as well. You’ll be surprised at what you can do when you bring your students to conferences. It can be a real game-changer for your school.
I hope you can all see the value in bringing students into the fold, making them aware of what’s important and why they should be involved. When you do, you’ll have a new group of fresh minds to pick their brains and in the process you’ll get to know more of what the end-users care about. And ultimately, this will help to drive your school forward in the decision-making process.
