On November 20th, we hosted a webinar in partnership with UCISA and the University of Birmingham. Our objective was to address the growing European student crisis. To meet this goal, Cherry Doyle, Product Owner at the University of Birmingham, shared concrete initiatives they have implemented through their engagement platform (MyUoB - developed with Ready Education), to support their students.

What you'll learn

• What does the growing student crisis look like? What are the main stats telling us? 
• How has the University of Birmingham achieved increased engagement and personalised student support via their University mobile app? 
• What can institutions do to support students:  
  • Who have financial problems? 
  • Who are under a lot of academic pressure? 
  • Who don’t know how to find key resources and information? 
  • Who experience mental health issues? 

A few quotes from Cherry

11:44 Worried about living costs campaign 

→ “We have a scheme called Student Content Shapers where we pay a group of students to create videos, blogs, information that’s going to help students through their journey at university. We found having that information coming from peers to be really powerful, and we’ve had some really good feedback about that from our students.”

21:04 Identifying students at risk 

“The increased amount of working hours does put pressure on students. Our response to that as an institution is to bring in a learning analytics tool. [...] It shows teaching staff how many hours a student has spent engaging with teaching materials, how many lectures they’ve attended… Essentially their level of engagement. [...] The benefit of staff having access to this is that they can identify students who are at risk.”

28:12 Improving communication between the University and the students

“I think communication through MyUoB is a really big part of making students aware of what support is available to them. [...] MyUoB is the third option for the question “what is your main source of information?”, slightly ahead of Instagram! But, we can see that students still rely on their email and notifications through our virtual learning environment. Luckily for them, both of those things are available in MyUoB.”

48:27 Supporting student mental health - Time to talk campaign

“It’s really important to recognise as an institution that well-being, mental health, talking, is not just somebody feeling depressed and needing a counselling session, but actually ranges all the way from students needing advice on how to have balance in their life and how to make healthier choices, all the way through really serious problems like addiction, suicidal thoughts. You have to provide services that really cover that complete spectrum.”

Want to learn more about ways to address the student crisis?