Student satisfaction in the age of consumer driven higher education

The global Higher Education sector (HE) is undergoing a metamorphosis. No longer is HE the sole preserve of the privileged few but rather it is now accessible for the masses. The result of such an expansionist philosophy is here and today’s undergraduate students can expect to study at a university that is unrecognisable to higher education establishments of a few decades ago. This is not a one-sided affair and academic staff i.e.,the professoriate who encounter the results of such expansionism on a daily basis are also faced with a vastly complex working environment(see e.g., Knight & Senior, 2017).Phrases such as internationalisation, employability, work-based learning as well as the almost ephemeral notion of student satisfaction,among many other things,regular assail the collective consciousness of academic staff around the world. Yet despite such complexity a new model is emerging and this is one firmly embedded within consumer psychology and it firmly places the student as a customer. Here we highlight some negative issues that may arise when HE embraces consumerism. We also discuss a potential solution that may not only ameliorate these issues but actually facilitate excellence in the student learning journeys.Higher education can meet this vast array of modern day concepts face-to-face and still ensure that it serves its core mission and that is to provide students with a higher understanding of various conceptual issues

‘The rules of engagement’:Student engagement and motivation to improve the quality of undergraduate learning

Studying at university continues to grow in popularity and the modern-day university has expanded considerably to meet this need. Invariably as such expansion occurs pressures arise on a range of quality enhancement processes. This may have serious implications for the continued delivery of high quality learning experiences that both meet the expectations of incoming students and are appropriate to their postgraduation aspirations. Ensuring students become active partners in their learning will encourage them to engage with a range of quality enhancement processes. The aim of the current work is to examine the various factors that motivate students to engage in such a fashion. Three focus groups were carried out in a stratified manner to ascertain student motivations and to triangulate an effective set of recommendations for subsequent practice. The participants consisted of engaged and non-engaged first year undergraduate students as well as student-facing staff who were asked to comment on their experiences as to why students would want to engage as a course representative. Nominal group technique was applied to the emerging thematic data in each group. Three key motivational themes emerged that overlapped across all focus groups i.e., a need for individual representation that makes a change, a desire to develop a professional skillset as well as a desire to gain a better understanding of their course of study. A university that aligns its student experience along these themes is likely to facilitate student representation. As is standard practice recommendations for future work are described alongside a discussion of the limitations

Student Primacy and the Post Pandemic University

© 2021 Senior, Howard, Stupple and Senior. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/According to the noted economist, Joseph Schumpeter, a period of creative destruction ensures long standing market arrangements are destroyed and in doing so resources are freed up to drive innovation. The results of this period of change can be dramatic with the so called “dominant design”—the market entity that drives behaviour in a specific consumer space—facing a weakening of its dominant position, invariably contending with threats from competitors and ultimately being forced to change its business processes to survive in the market (Schubert, 2013). Many would argue that the Covid 19 pandemic has forced such a process on the global higher education sector. While the sector gradually returns to some semblance of normality it is an opportune time to take stock of traditional practices and reflect on whether they can exist to serve the new university after this period of creative destruction has ended (see e.g., Krishnamurthy, 2020; Benito et al., 2021). Taking the above in hand focus must now turn to addressing a significant question: how can a university facilitate the primacy of the student to ensure that they are guided to make the right choice in joining a programme of study? In the traditional Higher Education (HE) sector, where the drive for marketisation is legion, this is a fairly complex question. However, the arrival of the pandemic landscape where the sector is likely to be faced with the unenviable task of making significant resource allocations in the context of so many unknown factors this question becomes Sisyphean in nature (Zhao and Watterston, 2021). The full extent of the impact socially, politically and economically alongside the cost to human life is yet to unfold. Nonetheless, the HE sector and more generally everyday life has been severely impacted. Internationally, many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have moved to “remote” or “online” learning models where the campus has been “locked down” in wake of the spread of the virus and moved to the homes of students, academics and support staff. We are still in an age of uncertainty, and the move back to the campus with regular face-to-face teaching is unknown as the global sector is locked into strategies of social isolation and distancing. Whilst HEIs are in the process of navigating their way through the crisis, the impact on student engagement with higher learning has not received much focus. University administrators must now answer a fundamental question. Do the traditional market principals and processes that have been much loved by sector managers carry as much value, if any, than they did in the pre-pandemic era? Furthermore what role, if any, does the undergraduate student play in this new and possibly very exciting environment? The United Kingdom HE sector has already seen student led protests calling for “no detriment” safeguards to protect grades and rent strikes on campus accommodation. This has put HEIs under increasing pressure to transform their current practices, but does this signal a move towards exposing the power of students as consumers in changing the higher education landscape or rather it merely identifies the established primacy of the student in the modern university (Jones et al., 2020)?Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

What Is the Role for Effective Pedagogy In Contemporary Higher Education?

The number of students entering into Higher Education (HE) continues to grow and as such the sector now stands at the threshold of a major shift in its philosophy. No longer does the academic prerogative belong to a generation who valued learning for the sake of enlightenment. Many contemporary undergraduate students enter their programmes of study with a primary desire to improve their position on the subsequent employability market. Universities have been quick to meet this need and institutional offerings have followed suit, enabling students to gain experience in a range of additional and subsidiary programmes that focus on the provision of 'value added' benefits. Here, students are encouraged to develop expertise in a range of topics from entrepreneurship and enterprise to intellectual property and even leadership skills. The first round of casualties that fall victim to such a shift are those programmes of study embedded within the humanities. As is evidenced by the falling numbers of enrolling students, the incoming cohort is less likely now to engage with such programmes, while participation in programmes that have a clear employability component has never been so high. To ensure that the HE sector continues to enable graduates to become effective citizens who contribute to the betterment of society a range of general questions need to be addressed. What does it mean to be an ‘authentic' university in the modern era? What are the real student expectations of HE and how are education providers framing and meeting these expectations? Is a new breed of academic leadership needed that will both meet the expectations of the students and guide the aspirations of academic staff? Finally, do we need an opportunity to reflect on the effective design and delivery of curriculum? Should the undergraduate student body play more of a role in the design of the curriculum or should the undergraduate student body play more of a role in the design of the curriculum or should they remain the recipients of a programme that has been designed by subject specialists? The scope of this book is wide but it brings the design and delivery of higher education programmes under the empirical gaze of educational psychology. That is to say, all chapters centre on the impact of higher educational programmes on the student-teacher relationship, student learning, achievement and identity. It is therefore crucial to explore the psychological impact of higher education institutions and how these can then be used to inform innovative educational practice and policy

‘The rules of engagement’: What motivates students to improve the quality of their learning experience ?

Studying at university continues to grow in popularity and the modern-day university has expanded considerably to meet this need. Invariably as such expansion occurs pressures arise on a range of quality enhancement processes. This may have serious implications for the continued delivery of high quality learning experiences that meets the expectations of incoming students and is appropriate to their postgraduation aspirations. Ensuring students become active partners in their learning will encourage them to engage with a range of quality enhancement processes. The aim of the current work was, to examine the various factors that motivate students to engage in such a fashion. To examine such factors three focus groups were carried out to triangulate an effective set of recommendations for subsequent practice. The participants consisted of engaged, and non-engaged students as well as student-facing staff who were asked to comment on their experiences as to why students would want to engage as a course representative. Nominal group technique was applied in each case that ensured participants in each group democratically ranked these factors in levels of importance. Three themes emerged that overlapped across all focus groups i.e., a need for individual representation that makes a change, a desire to develop a professional skill set as well as a desire to gain a better understanding of their course of study. A university that aligns its student experience along these themes is likely to facilitate student representation. As is standard practice recommendations for future work are described alongside a discussion of the limitations