“Engagement, to me, is probably…getting the most out of university…taking and making the most of available opportunities.”
This quote, from Queen’s University Belfast students’ union president Kieron Minto sums up a lot of the essential elements of what we talk about when we talk about student engagement.
It captures the sense that the higher education experience has multiple dimensions, incorporating personal and professional development as well as academic study. Students will be – and feel – successful to the extent that they invest time and energy in those activities that are the most purposeful. Critically, it captures the element of student agency in their own engagement – higher education institutions might make opportunities available but students need to decide to engage to get the most from them.
In recent years “student engagement” has suffered from the curse of ubiquity. Its meanings and applications are endlessly debated. Is it about satisfaction, academic success, personal growth, or a combination of factors? There is a wealth of examples of discrete projects and frameworks for thinking about student engagement, but often little read-across from one context to another. We can celebrate the enormous amount of learning and insight that has been created while at the same time accepting that as the environment for higher education changes some of the practices that have evolved may no longer be fit for purpose.
Higher education institutions and the students that are enrolled in them face a brace of challenges, from the learning and development losses of the Covid pandemic, to rising costs and income constraints, to technological change. Institutions are less able to support provision of the breadth of enriching opportunities to students at the same time as students have less money, time, and emotional bandwidth to devote to making the most of university.
The answer, as ever, is not to bemoan the circumstances, or worse, blame students for being less able to engage, but to tool up, get strategic, and adapt.
Students still want to make the most of the opportunities that higher education has to offer. The question is how to design and configure those opportunities so that current and future students continue to experience them as purposeful and meaningful.
Fresh student engagement thinking
Our report, Future-proofing student engagement in higher education, brings together the perspectives of academic and professional services staff, higher education leaders, and students, all from a range of institutions, to establish a firm foundation of principles and practices that can support coherent, intentional student engagement strategies.
A foundational principle for student engagement is that students’ motivations and engagement behaviours are shaped by their backgrounds, prior experiences, current environments, and hopes and expectations for their futures – as explained by Ella Kahu in her socio-cultural framework for student engagement (2013).
It follows that it is impossible to think about or have any kind of meaningful organisational strategy about student engagement without working closely in partnership with students, drawing on a wide range of data and insight about the breadth of students’ opinions, behaviours, and experiences. Similarly, it follows that a data-informed approach to student engagement must mean that the strategy evolves as students do – taking student engagement seriously means adopting an institutional mindset of preparedness to adapt in light of feedback.
Where our research indicates that there needs to be a strategic shift is in the embrace of what might be termed a more holistic approach to student engagement, in two important senses.
The first is understanding at a conceptual level how student engagement is realised in practice throughout every aspect of the student journey, and not just manifested in traditional metrics around attendance and academic performance.
The second is in how institutions, in partnership with students, map out a shared strategic intent for student engagement for every stage of that journey. That includes designing inclusive and purposeful interventions and opportunities to engage, and using data and insight from students to deepen understanding of what factors enable engagement and what makes an experience feel purposeful and engaging – and ideally creating a flow of data and insight that can inform continuous enhancement of engagement.
Theory into practice
Our research also points to how some of that shift might be realised in practice. For example, student wellbeing is intimately linked to engagement, because tired, anxious, excluded or overwhelmed students are much less able to engage. When we spoke to university staff about wellbeing support they were generally likely to focus on student services provision. But students highlighted a need for a more proactive culture of wellbeing throughout the institution, including embedding wellbeing considerations into the curriculum and nurturing a supportive campus culture. Similarly, on the themes of community and belonging, while university staff were likely to point to institutional strategic initiatives to cultivate belonging, students talked more about their need for genuine individual connections, especially with peers.
There was also a strong theme emerging about how institutions think about actively empowering students to have the confidence and skills to “navigate the maze” of higher education opportunities and future career possibilities. Pedagogies of active learning, for example, build confidence and a sense of ownership over learning, contributing to behavioural and psychological engagement. Developing students’ digital literacy means that students can more readily deploy technology to support connection with academics and course peers, make active critical choices about how they invest time in different platforms, and prepare for their future workplace. Before getting exercised about how today’s students do not arrive in higher education “prepared to engage,” it’s worth remembering just how much larger and more complicated the contemporary university is, and with these, the increased demands on students.
While there is a lot that institutions can do to move forward their student engagement agenda independently, there is also a need for a renewed focus on student engagement from the higher education sector as a whole. The megathemes contributing to shifting student engagement patterns are shared; they are not distinctive to any institution type, geography, or student demographic.
The promise of higher education – that you can transform your life, your identity and your future through a higher education experience – only holds true if students are willing and able to engage with it. This demands a unified effort from all involved.
Institutions must prioritise student engagement, placing it at the heart of their strategies and decisions. Furthermore, the higher education sector as a whole must renew its focus on student engagement, recognising its fundamental role in achieving the goals of higher education. Finally, as regulatory bodies evolve their approach to the assessment and enhancement of academic quality, student engagement must once again be put front and centre of the higher education endeavour.
This article is published in association with evasys. You can download a copy of Future-proofing student engagement here.
