Elevating student voice in higher education: Five strategies for turning good intentions into good outcomes

As higher education institutions continue to strengthen their student experience offer, one phrase is increasingly gaining traction: student voice.

Put simply, student voice involves three things:

1. Students actively shaping their learning experience.
2. Students sharing and reflecting on their overall experience.
3. Students shaping and having a stake in the major decisions undertaken by their institutions.

The importance of student voice is almost universally accepted, but most institutions fail to do it well. They find themselves unable to move beyond simplistic, lagging approaches – like end-of-unit surveys or large-scale co-design processes (often linked to updating strategies) – that are difficult to scale and embed continually. For many institutions, student voice is merely a strategic line item that features in reports rather than a cultural and practical norm.

So how can student voice be enacted more broadly at higher education institutions?

Drawing on our diverse experiences – Sarah as a Nous digital and design expert who is passionate about transformative work and Ben as the CEO of Ziplet, a company that helps higher education institutions to measure, understand and improve their student experience – we set out to answer this question.

We are pleased to present our five strategies for elevating student voice to support a leading student experience and a vibrant learning community.

The core challenge for institutions is embedding student voice in everyday activities. Institutions must recognise that student voice is not an adjunct to core delivery or a one-off exercise; it needs to be part of the everyday lived experience at an institution.

Institutions should begin with their learning and teaching model, ensuring that student reflection and timely feedback is part of overall delivery. One or two critical questions asked during a class can be highly effective in getting students to reflect on their learning and contribute to where it goes next.

Lecturers and tutors can supplement this continuous feedback approach with an arc of questions across a semester, selectively checking in with students about their experience to understand where they need the most support. The key is a small number of targeted questions spaced across the semester, not a long survey at the end of a unit in which only future student cohorts will benefit.

This approach not only gathers useful data on which an educator can reflect and adapt accordingly, but signals to students that their voice matters. And if their views are acted upon, they will be motivated to contribute more, leading to a more reflective and vibrant learning community.

Institutions should identify key moments that shape students’ overall experience, such as early in semester, to find out how well students are settling in and how to set them up to succeed. A kiosk or a tablet device in a library or a service centre can be an easy way to ask students about their service experience.

Some leading institutions Ziplet works with have focused on student voice in work placements, which are vital to a student’s success. These placements are also when students are most reflective: lightweight technology can be used to understand a student’s experience, and more importantly, whether it has delivered on expectations.

One problem with student voice is institutions’ perception that most students do not actively engage in it. This is not because they don’t want to, but because institutions have either made it time-consuming (through long surveys or co-design sessions) or not provided students with confidence that their voices will contribute to anything.

The key to turning this around is to develop lightweight, continuous ways to involve students in student voice. Check-in tools in the classroom or asking about the broader student experience at key moments, gather important but minimal-effort reflections from students.

What must follow is a highly disciplined and focused way for institutions to report changes. Very few institutions have a structured approach to communicating back to their students about the impact of student voice initiatives and changes that have been made.

This reporting needs to be not only at the whole-of-institution level, but also at more local levels like in the classroom or individual services. The more and the better institutions report, the more students will activate their own voice organically.

The challenge for institutions is not to decide if they will invest in student voice, but rather how they will invest. Institutions must make it easier for students to activate their voices while resisting the urge to point to specific outputs or one-off exercises as examples of embracing student voice.

Until institutions commit to continuous, lightweight and scalable student voice programs in which all students can easily participate, institutions will not really be listening to their student population – at best they will hear from the loudest voices, not necessarily the most representative ones.

In an increasingly competitive environment, this is critical: If you don’t listen, someone else will.

Get in touch to discuss how to best enact student voice in your higher education institution.

Sarah Bell is a Director, Design, at Nous Group. Ben Barnett is CEO of Ziplet, a company that helps higher education institutions to measure, understand and improve their student experience.

Connect with Sarah Bell and Ben Barnett on LinkedIn.