3 Effective Student Engagement Strategies for Professional Services
Student engagement is the key to student success. Research, such as this 2020 report by Advance HE, demonstrates how a student’s level of engagement – that is, how much time, energy and effort they put into their studies and broader university life – can have a significant impact on retention and progression.
Understandably, then, keeping students engaged has been a big focus for providers across the higher education sector. Especially in the academic context, there are plenty of examples of initiatives being rolled out across the sector, aiming to engage students through teaching and learning.
However, while the academic aspect is a crucial element of the student life, it does not stand on its own. An important facet of the student experience is also found in the way that students interact or engage with professional services. When students engage effectively with services across the university, this can enhance both their experience and their outcomes. Such services could include careers and employability, student experience teams and student support.
So, with this in mind, what strategies can professional service teams implement to ensure they are effectively engaging students? In this article, we explore 5 of the most successful strategies and encourage you to think about how you can implement them within your own services.
1. Create a Welcoming and Inclusive Community
The transition from secondary education into higher education – or from employment back into education for some learners – can be daunting. New students often arrive feeling lost and unsure of where they can find support when required. This is where professional services departments can play a crucial role in creating a welcoming and inclusive environment that fosters belonging.
In addition to the standard practices such as orientation or induction processes, with regular check points and signposting throughout the student journey, services could consider interventions such as:
Developing personalised student journey maps – this might include using data analytics to understand student behaviours, preferences and challenges to then develop personalised support plans tailored to individual needs or “buddy” systems that pair students with similar backgrounds and interests.
Create digital platforms for community building – this means enabling students to connect with peers, faculty and staff. You could use social media to foster engagement and share student stories or develop mobile apps that provide easy access to resources, events and support services.
Create inclusive and accessible spaces – this might mean designing physical spaces that are welcoming and inclusive for all students, providing accessible technology and support services for students with disabilities, and embedding cultural competency training for staff to create a more inclusive environment.
Engage in cross-departmental collaboration – by breaking down silos between different departments, you can create a more cohesive student experience that helps to foster engagement. This might involve developing joint initiatives that address student needs holistically and sharing best practices and resources across departments.
These action points demonstrate how professional services in universities can work to support a strong sense of belonging and community among students beyond the curriculum. By raising awareness of support and making it easy to access, services can stop students from falling through the cracks when they are struggling and therefore might be less likely to engage fully with their studies and wider university life.
2. Leverage Learning Analytics to Understand Engagement
Learning analytics can provide invaluable insights into student behaviour. They can therefore be used by professional services to identify and support students who are at risk of disengagement. Some strategies for doing so might include:
Using analytics to understand student engagement – You might use the data to identify key engagement indicators or metrics that correlate with student success such as course participation, assignment completion, library usage and attendance; establish baseline engagement levels for different student groups (e.g., year of study, course or demographic); and monitor engagement trends over time to identify potential issues early.
Identifying students at risk – You can using learning analytics to determine critical engagement levels below which students might require intervention, to create early warning systems that can be automated and to segment students into specific groups that might be more at risk for disengagement (e.g., first year students, international students).
Delivering targeted interventions – This might be personalised depending on the learning analytics data and can be delivered with academic staff. Solutions might include extra academic support, wellbeing support, peer mentoring, financial aid or technology support.
Measuring impact – You can continually improve your learning analytics data by evaluating how effective the interventions you delivered were based on the information provided, and refining your strategies where the desired impact is lacking.
So, while learning analytics may seem like the remit of academic departments, it is actually very relevant to those in student services who wish to understand how and why students do – or don’t – engage with their studies and wider university life. By using this information to inform service delivery and working closely with academic colleagues, services can spot the signs of disengagement early and support students to get back on track.
3. Co-Designing Services with Students to Enhance Engagement
Co-designing services with students is a powerful way to ensure that professional services are relevant, accessible and effective. In doing so, services can increase engagement and create a more holistic student experience. Some examples of ways services can co-produce their interventions and service delivery alongside their students might include:
Establishing student feedback channels – such as regular surveys, focus groups or student advisory panels.
Involving students in the service design process – this might include design sprints (collaborative workshops with students to brainstorm and prototype new services), student-led projects or co-creation labs.
Using technology – such as online platforms for idea sharing and collaboration, engaging students via social media, or making the co-design process fun and engaging through gamification or game-based activities.
For further inspiration on this theme, take a look at these examples of how university libraries are co-creating with their students to create new spaces that better meet their needs, thereby increasing engagement and optimising their learning outcomes.
The key to co-designing services with students to increase engagement is to make sure that students’ voices are heard and any relevant actions limited, and to ensure that the resulting services are accessible and student-centric.
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