Following an informative and successful small scale user testing with staff and students, the Digital Student Data service has received the go ahead to move forward with its developments. The project will be carrying out a beta phase in the new year with a small set of institutional pilots across further and higher education.
Background:
Since April 2015, we have been exploring the development of a prototype service to support the collection and analysis of data on student expectations, experiences, attitudes and satisfaction with digital technologies in their studies in UK higher and further education and skills. The service would make it easier for universities, colleges and skills providers to collect and analyse student expectations and experience data using well-designed and robust questions, and would enable institutions to compare their data internally (for example by faculty or campus) and with other aggregated, anonymised institutional profiles.
The Digital Student Data Service will enable institutions to:
– gather evidence to support decisions about digital developments, and track changes
– target qualitative research on the student digital experience where it’s most needed
– demonstrate to students and quality bodies that they are engaging students in decisions about their digital experience
The Digital Student Data Service will also enable Jisc to:
– gather a sector-level longitudinal evidence base of student expectations and experiences of technology which we can use to inform future Jisc work and share back with our community.
We would like to thank those who participated in our user testing of the alpha question set delivered as a BOS survey. The questions were developed from the Jisc NUS TSEP Benchmarking the student digital experience tool. You can view these questions which we have developed with sector experts Helen Beetham and Tabetha Newman here.
Please note these questions will be revised with the feedback we have received from the user testing, before use in the beta phase with the institutional pilots.
Next steps:
In January 2016, we will be planning the pilot phase with approximately ten institutions from across further and higher education. Should you be interested in being involved in the first pilot phase please email Sarah.knight@jisc.ac.uk
You may also be interested in joining the Jiscmail list for this project: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/jisc-digitalstudent-data
You can read about the earlier stages of this project here.