Improving the Quality of Student Information in a Modular University

Improving the quality of student information in a modular university: voices from the Student Information Project

Jaswinder Dhillon, University of Wolverhampton

Summary of presentation at the 3rd International Conference
"Researching Vocational Education and Training" July 14-16 1999, Bolton Institute

Abstract

This paper reports on the findings of a research and developmental project focussing on identifying strategies for improving the quality and the communication of information to undergraduate students. The Student Information Project, (SIP), carried out a substantive qualitative study of information needs at Wolverhampton University and has formulated recommendations for action which are being taken forward by senior managers. The findings which will be presented at the conference offer strategies for improving the communication of information to students and may help other organisations in evaluating their own processes and procedures for effective communication in their organisation. The research approach also uncovered challenges for developing an information and communications strategy in a large organisation and offers insights into the process of managing cultural change through the voices of staff and students interviewed during the consultation for the project.

Background

Wolverhampton is a modular multi-campus university, which is undergoing considerable structural change. The senior management team has changed significantly over the last year with the appointment of new members of the Executive including posts at vice-chancellor, pro-vice chancellor and director level and subsequent changes to individual responsibilities. Wolverhampton has also decided to withdraw from ISO9000, though the culture of this particular approach to quality assurance is still part of the institutional culture and was a significant focus for quite unsolicited comment from staff from all parts of the university during the project work for SIP.

Context

The remainder of this summary will elaborate on the decisions which influenced the research approach taken in SIP and other factors which set the context for the project work including debates at national level and the external environment.

The University recognising the crucial role of information management in future teaching and research in higher education set up an Information Strategy Group, (ISG), to steer the development of an information strategy. The group, representative of the different organisational parts of the university, is chaired by a pro-vice chancellor and includes senior managers from academic schools of the university, together with directors of teaching and learning and IT services and representatives from student support services including registry and learning centres. The group decided to invest in some empirical research to inform their work and employed an information strategy co-ordinator to ground their work in the learning organisation approach to quality improvement.

The ISG guided the project work in the context of national developments and recommendations, including the detailed set of guidelines produced by the Joint Information Systems Committee, (JISC), to assist higher education institutions in developing an information strategy. The opening remarks from the guidelines highlight the need for a strategy for the communication of knowledge and information,

'Information is the lifeblood of higher education institutions. It is a resource and needs managing as such; this puts it on a par with finance and human resources’. (JISC, 1995).

Dearing also recommends the development of a strategy,

‘The full exploitation of C&IT by higher education institutions will require senior management to take an imaginative leap in devising a strategy for their institutions which can bring about this change’ (Recommendation 41 Dearing Report, 1997).

HEFCE require higher education institutions to have information and communication strategies in place by 1999/2000. Thus, the external environment and the need to develop positive attitudes towards information and its management are compelling reasons for developing an IS.

The JISC guidelines define an information strategy as a set of attitudes in which:

any information that should be available for sharing is well defined and accessible
the quality of information is fit for its purpose(eg accuracy, currency, consistency)
staff know and exercise their responsibilities towards information
priorities can be identified and acted upon

The JISC guidelines, other literature and workshops organised by JISC were used to inform the work on developing draft principles to guide the process of developing an information strategy for the University and these were piloted in the project.

A project definition workshop led by the Information Strategy Co-ordinator was held to agree the aims and scope of the pilot project and to discuss methodology. The workshop was helpful and productive in giving direction to the process of developing an information strategy and in giving a focus to the first ISG project. To confirm the decisions reached at the workshop a written summary of feedback from the workshop was circulated to ISG members by the co-ordinator. This process was seen as important in keeping the group informed and in developing their ownership of the project by involving them as participants in the research process. The co-ordinator, as researcher, was close to the approach of participatory action research and tried to keep to this in the way she used the ISG to steer the project work.

The agreed aims of the project were to:

To develop principles to guide the formulation and implementation of an information strategy for the University
To recommend improvements to information for students.

The initial scope of SIP was to map information flows to full-time undergraduate students at the early stages of their academic lifecycle so first year students in the second semester of study at the University were sampled. Later during the project work the scope was extended to include third year students nearing the completion of their lifecycle. Responses via the Web further extended the scope to include second year students and postgraduates.

Guiding principles were formulated at the project definition workshop and used to underpin the research approach and inform the choice of methods used for data collection.

The following guiding principles were agreed and used to inform practice during the project work. The need to:

emphasise links between knowledge and information and core business (i.e. teaching, learning and research)
be inclusive and participative to develop ‘a set of attitudes’ as defined in the JISC guidelines
focus on information and information needs, with technology as an enabler
promote cultural change amongst staff and develop an awareness of their responsibilities towards information and its communication
show commitment to sharing and communication of information to achieve objectives

Methodology

The choice of methodology was guided by the JISC initiative documented in the guidelines and the experience of the six JISC pilot sites that have been involved in developing information strategies. The practitioner’s guide section of the JISC guidelines identifies two techniques for defining information needs: logical functions approach and lifecycle approach. The majority of the pilot sites had adopted a logical functions approach and a small number of projects reported plans to adopt a life cycle approach.

Both approaches were considered for SIP and it was agreed to adopt a lifecycle approach for several reasons. Firstly, the focus on information for students seemed more suited to a lifecycle approach as it would give a more complete picture of information flows to students during the academic lifecycle as a logical functions approach can miss links between organisational units e.g. academic schools and central departments. Secondly, JISC pilot sites that had carried out projects on student information flows had adopted a lifecycle approach to map key information sources.

The third reason was the institutional context of the University; the only higher education institution having ISO9000 quality procedures in place which give something comparable to a functions approach. The JISC guidelines suggest that it would be advantageous to undertake an analysis of information needs using both the logical functions approach and the lifecycle approach to check that nothing had been missed. Since the ISO procedures were already in place it was decided to adopt the lifecycle approach to audit information flows and to check the extent to which staff were aware of their responsibilities for the quality and communication of information to students.

The lifecycle approach was used to map the organisational units at the University with a responsibility for communicating information to students during the undergraduate student lifecycle.

The guiding principles and the institutional context were used to determine the methods of data collection for the information audit. A significant influence on the choice of methodology was a JISC workshop on information auditing facilitated by Orna, (1998), an experienced consultant in information strategy who identified interviews as the most appropriate method for facilitating cultural change and promoting ownership and responsibility for the quality of information in an organisation. Interviewing ‘custodians’ of information, (i.e. those with some responsibility for information) would provide an opportunity to analyse the organisational culture for change management purposes as well as audit information flows to students. Questionnaires were the least likely to yield useful data for the purposes of the project given that staff and students were routinely asked to complete many questionnaires, some as part of the quality procedures. Anecdotal evidence indicated they were very sceptical of them, as they did not view them as leading to improvement.

Interviews were the most appropriate method for conducting the information audit given the purposes of the project and the institutional context. The qualitative data would give a much deeper understanding of the culture of the organisation and the focus on information to students was sufficiently non-threatening to staff and key to the core business of the University. Furthermore, the findings of a previous quantitative survey of information distributed to students was already available.

The information audit addressed two fundamental questions:

1.What information do we provide for students?

2.What information should we provide for students?

The audit used a combination of methods for data collection:

Face-to-face in depth interviews with staff and students
Postal survey to a random sample of first year students
Web responses from staff and students collected via the University home page
Focus group discussions with students

The two questions given above were used as the basis for devising questions for use in semi-structured interviews with representative categories of staff and students.

The information map was used to identify a representative sample of staff who were custodians of information for students; Directors of Study, Learning Centre staff, Deans of School, staff from the Counselling and Guidance Service, Media and Publicity, Registry and officers from the Students’ Union. As well as sampling each organisational unit with a responsibility for student information the staff and students interviewed also represented two different Schools: Humanities and Social Science and Applied Sciences located on two different campuses of the University.

During the period from April- June 1998 nine interviews with staff and seven interviews with students from these representative constituencies were carried out and transcribed. In addition, a survey was conducted of students registered on awards in the two schools which constituted the research sample. This method of data collection proved to be completely unsuccessful as although a personal letter and questionnaire were sent to a random sample of students, no responses were received.

During the same period information about the project and the questions for staff and questions for students were mounted on the University home page with a request for participation in the project to all staff and students. Eleven responses from staff and thirty responses from students were received by the end of July. There were two frivolous responses, one from a student and the other from a disaffected member of staff which were ignored for data analysis purposes. All other responses were constructive and many were very detailed. Students were asked to indicate their course, year of study and whether they were full or part time at the end of their electronic response.

By using different media for communication and data collection the scope of the project was extended though the same questions were used in all methods of data collection. SIP was also able to link to other research projects and the questions about information for students were incorporated into focus group discussions by another researcher. Relevant responses from the focus groups were transcribed and used in the analysis of findings.

The findings will be presented and discussed at the conference session.