Why We Need To Focus On Students
From the beginning at notebowl, we set out to help students succeed in and out of the classroom. At EDUCAUSE, I plan to help increase awareness of the dire need to focus on what really matters: the students.
Are we focusing on the right solutions to help students today?
Today the learning platforms at universities and schools across the world are mainly administrative-driven. Buzzwords dominate the marketing of products and services that are supposed to be for students and faculty. Many of the buzzwords claim to engage students or have them collaborate with others. But then, when you actually get on the tool, it’s collaborating in a 1995-style forum that no Generation Z student will recognize or want to use.
The learning platforms of yesterday are not suited for the students of tomorrow. We desperately need to focus on user experience if we want to help students and faculty have a better experience. And by focusing on the user experience, we need one that is second nature to students. That allows students to not need training, to go on and understand where information is for classes because everything is so simple.
We need to question what solutions we have looked at in the past and bring in students to help decide what kind of platforms should be implemented at their schools.
Are we bringing students into the conversation?
I don’t believe we do enough to bring students into early conversations on choosing learning platforms for schools. As an example, we should have students at universities across the country attending EDUCAUSE! If you are truly buying a solution for students to utilize, we should have the vast majority of your user population represented at the conference. I do see faculty at conferences, but faculty only represent around 5% of the users at an institution. Students represent the other 95%. Let’s raise awareness to get more student leaders involved. A good way to do this is to include student government and student boards very early in the discovery process. What doesn’t work is including students after the discovery process and when the LMS’s have come down to the final 2 or 3. In order to give students the options and to fully discover what’s out there, we need to alter how we go about looking for solutions.
We have student retention all wrong
Every administrator cares about student retention, success and engagement, but we are looking to solve it in the wrong way. I’m sorry but login data on an LMS is not going to help retention much.
What’s going to improve retention is shifting your mindset. If you want to improve retention, you must focus on the student in a different way than you may be thinking today. We need the learning experiences in the classroom and online to be about them. We need the platforms that we have at schools to be focused on the student experience.
Why? Because the problems that faculty have all go to the root of the problem — the students!
It’s very difficult to understand how to see the root of the problem but it’s true. Students create many issues today for faculty. Faculty become customer support agents for classrooms and have to answer an incredible number of questions over email. But instead of coming up with some CRM tool to help faculty send emails back to students, the solution is to think about the root of the problem… why are students asking so many questions over email to faculty in the first place? Because they have no other place to ask a question. And they have nowhere they can easily ask the entire class.
A social learning platform that focuses on students allows for that to happen in one place for the entire classroom to interact like they would on any social network today. And then, what happens is you eliminate the vast majority of emails faculty get by having a place where everyone can see conversation and questions being asked.
But you might be thinking…
they can just ask a question like that on the discussion forums right?
No, that does not work. It’s not organic, it’s not the forefront and it’s an old style that is not second nature to students.
A social learning platform puts the conversation at the forefront, which is the most important factor to getting students to participate in organic and not required assignment discussion. Organic discussion is different from required discussion. And today, students have zero way to do that online on any LMS.
Overall, if you focus on the student, you solve all sorts of problems for everyone. You have to shift your mindset to see it, but once you do, it will change everything for you and your institution, and how that alters a school’s mission.
The mission should be about student success
Which is what it’s all about here at EDUCAUSE. The reason schools exist is to provide students with the ability to learn, find their interests and passion and go off and tackle challenges and become successful in their own way. If that is true, and schools have the same mission to provide success to students, then we need to act on it and not just say it.
The biggest factor in not obtaining the kind of student success metrics that schools want is not focusing on the right areas to improve student success. They understand the problems that exist but many do not know how to solve them. If you can start to look from the perspective of the student when it comes to making a purchase decision on a learning platform or tool for your campus, you’ll change the dynamic for students at your institution.
My personal goal with notebowl is to create awareness about the need for learning platforms to be about the student and what is possible when you focus on them. So many problems that administrators deal with come from the lack of focus on the student. If you start to look at the student perspective, doors of opportunity will open for your institution. Every decision you make will change because you now need to look at it from other angles.
And by doing so, you’ll put your institution on the right track to have high retention, engaged students and ultimately become a thought leader in education.
