It’s the experience, student

The student experience is becoming increasingly important, as universities gear up for 2012. And service providers are recalibrating their activities accordingly. Higher education is starting to be exposed to the types of market research that emerged years ago in financial services, retail and telecommunications, as universities look for new ways to keep their customers, according to financial and risk management consultants Deloitte. Monish Paul, Deloitte Australia’s education team leader, said repeat business was becoming almost as important as initial recruitment to universities planning for the demand-driven system of 2012 and beyond. He said “stickiness” was the new buzz word, as university executives plotted ways of hanging on to their students – and enticing them back again – in an increasingly competitive environment. “As we move into this new world of the funding following the student, there’s almost a religious emphasis on retaining that student through his or her life cycle,” Paul said. “How do we maximise our chances of being able to keep that student – keeping them longer within the institution and offering on-sell opportunities such as PhDs or masters? “Performance and funding are going to be increasingly dependent on how the student feels about the institution. Infrastructure is critical because it fundamentally affects the student experience. How do we use our IT as a proactive tool to offer our students a lot more stickiness? “And student experience isn’t just academic life. It’s all the other things the student touches, feels and senses at the institution. It’s the tavern, the library, the accommodation, the social activities.” Paul said Deloitte counted 28 universities, 16 TAFE institutes, some private providers and most state and territory departments of education and training among its clients. He said the company was now performing the sort of advanced data analytics for tertiary education clients that it had provided years ago in other industries. “Years ago we were starting to talk about stickiness in the financial services sector –how we retain the customer, and how we segment our customers into different behaviours. Telecommunications providers have gone down a similar path, as has retail. “We’re starting to apply some of these techniques in education – analysing thousands of variables across the student life-cycle, right from the marketing before they become a student through to alumni. How do you segment a student into different profiles of how they buy, and what values they have when it comes to their student experience? “We can start to build some very specific and granular strategies to make sure that student enjoys his or her experience.” However Allen Blewitt, CEO of the Co-op Bookshop, said that as campuses expanded there was a risk of overlooking student experience. “With large numbers, with more recourse to digital learning – podcasts rather than lectures and so on – there is to a certain extent a depersonalisation of the campus experience,” he said. “Many institutions are building more campus accommodation. That’s utterly appropriate. But if you put more students on campus and the campus has a dead heart, they will just sit in their little student units and not have any interaction. “Increasing participation rates is a worthy objective for the government. But if it’s a depersonalised experience, then is the nation going to get the benefits of more people having a tertiary education? It could be just a narrow functional experience rather than interaction with other learners from different backgrounds and disciplines.” Blewitt said every campus needed a central space with coffee shops, the library and –predictably, given the nature of his business – a bookstore. Paul said course offerings would also become an increasingly significant aspect of students’ feelings about their institutions. He said more universities would emulate Melbourne, Western Australia and Macquarie in differentiating themselves through the structure of their qualifications. But he said universities were also conscious of the expense of reorganising their course structures, and that some would take an activity-based costing approach to teaching and learning as well as their research. He said universities were also hooking up to save money on their corporate services, through strategies such as collaborative procurement. “Rather than single university contracts with suppliers, you start to look at those same contracts across a number of universities,” he said. “Good sourcing practices are all about aggregation and getting strategic partnerships in place with suppliers. One can also look at different delivery models. Do they need to be done in house, or does it make sense to outsource it and get a lower cost of delivery? “IT infrastructure is quite an overhead for all universities. There’s a strong reliance on stable IT foundations and applications. Once again there are some opportunities around co-shared IT infrastructure.” Paul said institutions would increasingly confront the “sacred cow” of mergers and acquisitions, particularly across the higher education-VET sectoral divide. “It’s not something that’s traditionally occurred within the education space, but I think it’ll happen. If not in the next year or two, certainly in five to ten years we’ll start to see an aggregation and consolidation across the two sectors.” Digital didn’t kill the paperback store People keep saying the digital era is going to mean the end of retail book selling as we know it, according to Co-op Bookshop CEO Allen Blewitt. “It hasn’t happened yet,” he told CR. Blewitt said that while podcasts and videos were powerful ways of enriching education, paper would remain at the core of university learning for some time yet. “You can’t just assume that because it’s available on the web, every student will prefer to learn from digital materials,” he said. “You need moderation by an intelligent lecturer who knows how to structure a package to maximise the learning for the students. You can’t just leave it to chance and say, it’s a brain dump, here it is.” Blewitt said the Co-op planned to meet the competitive challenge of e-books by becoming an ‘information hub’ of hardware, software, customised publishing and print-on-demand services. He said bookstores would also have a role advising students and academics on e-learning materials, and even partnering with web-based learning systems. “Academics need advice just as much as students in terms of, do you know any new stuff that’s coming out? What about that one? How are students reacting to it? “In the future we will be part of an ecosystem on campus where learning materials – whether they be books or e-books – are integrated in blended learning approaches.”