Are you responsible for updating website content to ensure students have an accurate reference to answer any question they may have during their studies (what funding am I entitled to, who do I contact for an extension to my deadline, how do I tell my department I’ll be absent next week and countless other questions)? If so, you are part of what we’ll call the passive student support approach. The basis for this being that our students are competent independent learners who can research and access relevant information where and when they require it, we put the onus on the student here being ready and willing to ask for help, and that they will have an idea of the type of support they may need. As a first option, this is a credible option for supporting our students, and can complement our other options quite nicely, but the resources we employ here are prone to becoming out of date with the pace of change in UK Higher Education regulation and we may lose track of what pages are where or who is responsible for each one. Ultimately, we need to provide comprehensive passive support to students, but this, on its own, is entirely insufficient in the modern university.
As a step on from our passive support, we have re-active support. On a basic level, if you’ve set up a mailbox for students to contact with relevant issues, this is inviting the questions to come to you so that you can react and give the student the appropriate information (which may or may not take the form of sending a link to, or quoted portion of text from, the relevant website page on the topic). This approach helps us to be aware of the students asking for support, the types of issues they are facing, and which of the support resources we have are being used most often. With a re-active approach, we can be confident that any student who asks us for support will be sign-posted to the appropriate resources and/or team. Whilst this helps us to have greater visibility of who is accessing support than a purely passive approach, we are still reliant on students to be ready and willing to ask for support before it is too late.
Taking this another step forward, we consider the pro-active approach to student support. We will still be using all of the tools prepared for us in the passive and re-active approaches, but here, we use our university systems to evaluate the available data and start trying to pre-emptively offer support to students who may need it but have not yet asked for it. We have a wide range of data available to us in UK HE, from our assessment data, to lecture capture records, library access data, catering outlet usage and attendance being some of the most obvious, but there will undoubtably be others not mentioned here which can also be evaluated. With this data accessible, we can look at what our experience tells us about these different data points and when we might want to use these to contact our students to offer support.
Do we see a number of students who’ve got through the first 6 weeks of the term and never set foot in the library? This might not be a concern if these students are accessing the relevant material elsewhere, but where’s the harm in sending these students an email with a refresher of the library information, a highlight of some facilities that might be useful to them and contact details in case they want to check something before attending. We can apply this to any threshold for any of these data points where some may (typically through institutional experience) have a direct link to different levels of student achievement and others are a nice bonus but not vital to student outcomes. With a mind to supporting our international students, we may want to look at sending an early alert to students with visas if their engagement starts to look like it will drop below the levels in our attendance policy to address support needs in time and help to show that we are taking steps to support our students to remain engaged during their studies should an auditor want to see evidence of this.
Our passive and re-active approaches are based entirely upon the actions and availability of our staff to produce/maintain the relevant resources and to receive/respond to the emails coming into our specific mailboxes. The pro-active approach shifts the involvement of staff from finding out who needs support or responding to emails towards being able to review the communication automatically sent to students across the different situations we identify and to contact them with more specific support provision. All this can be achieved through the implementation of a joined-up set of institutional systems capturing and interrogating the available data.
If you’d like to know more about my experiences of supporting students in UK HE, or how we can support you and your institution in supporting your students, get in touch.
About the author:
Gareth has worked for Simac since 2022 as an implementation consultant, supporting universities from initial implementation to continued process improvement and development. Prior to joining Simac, Gareth spent nearly 10 years working in London Higher Education institutions with as a Visa Compliance manager with some additional experience in timetabling, policy writing and course administration.
