First off, choosing a university or college is NOT like buying a telly but something I heard in a presentation today about a learner’s journey through university reminded me of some of the things I thought when we replaced our telly recently. (You remember, the one I mentioned in this post? Of course you do.)
It’s to do with what you look at when you’re choosing a new TV versus the actual experience of owning one.
A shiny new telly
What do most people look for in a new TV? I’m going to guess things like, in no particular order:
- Price
- Screen size (for aesthetics and/or practicality)
- Picture and sound quality
- Function – what will it allow me to do over and above watching channels.
- Brand
What I suspect a sizeable number of people don’t think about is what is it going to be like to interact with. OK, I did but I’m a professional geek. I don’t count.
How much time do we spend in the showroom navigating through the menu and settings? Our last TV setup was pretty cruddy. We had to swap between inputs frequently, the digital programme guide was clunky and uncustomisable, lacking a favourites function and there were a host of other minor irritations.
I know, #firstworldproblems.
Each thing was fairly trivial but when you add up the time you have to spend over the lifetime of the TV battling these annoying inefficiencies it turns out to be a major part of the “telly experience”.
So that’s like university, how?
This is something I suspect, but don’t know for sure. You can correct me.
I suspect many people choose a university or college based on the educational equivalent of picture quality, brand, price and features. Read: course content, institutional reputation, fees, accommodation, social experience and so on.
In mobile terms it’s the difference between the design of the phone and the apps it runs versus the OS.
These are, of course, crucial. But they’re not the entirety of the student experience. What about the equivalent of navigating through menus, personalising the settings etc? In other words, course administration, finance systems, accommodation services, IT systems and processes…
If these things work well, they disappear into the background and just happen. When they go wrong, as Ruth Drysdale, the presenter today said, they can be the things that sometimes push students over the edge!
Ellen Lessner challenged me asking how many prospective students make choices about college on university based on this level of detail. Very few, I guess.
But the important thing is for institutions to think about these aspects of the student experience as much as the learning experience. Are they designed around the students’ needs or the institution’s? Do they merge into the background or does dealing with them become a frustrating battle that ends up taking up much of a learner’s time and effort to deal with?
It’s important because these things can have an impact on student satisfaction, retention, attainment and the bottom line.
In other news
I’ve been encouraged to read Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier and The Circle by Dave Eggers
Image by Pawel Kadysz – CC0 – from Unsplash
