Feedback Matters: How Can the Student Voice Deliver Transformational Business and Management Education?

Reading Time: Less than 4 mins.

Synopsis: Explorance’s GM Europe & Africa John Atherton unveils the new Feedback Matters report just released by Explorance, detailing how numerous Business and Management-focused Higher Education institution around the globe are placing the Student Voice at the heart of their plans for institutional success. 

A Warm Response

It was back in November 2020 that Explorance first published ‘Engaging the student voice in our ‘new normal’, which featured a range of articles from senior university leaders on how their institutions were planning to capture and act upon feedback from students in a COVID environment.

The response we received – from our customers, non-customers and those operating more widely across Higher Education – was hugely positive.

One of the main themes consistently noted was how the report effectively helped fill a void in terms of knowledge-sharing, insight, and best practices across the sector – not least during a time where in-person opportunities to share intelligence in the usual ways were more limited.

Our community also expressed interest in receiving insight from different types of institutions we work with, and in different regions.

A New Series of Insight Reports

We are therefore proud to launch Feedback Matters, our new regular thought leadership paper exploring how the student voice – as ascertained via course and module evaluation surveys – influences institutional enhancement.

Our first issue is a Business and Management Education Focus Report, a natural focus for us given that Explorance helps business schools and university-based business and management faculties around the world improve teaching and learning through the way they derive, analyse, and respond to student feedback.

Explorance provides solutions for formative feedback, giving lecturers the opportunity to seek feedback through bespoke, non-standard questions, during a module, and summative evaluation surveys at the end of semester that provide standardisation on questions which enables comparisons between courses/cohorts.

Explorance’s Blue People Insights Platform is generally used for end-of-term and mid-term evaluations and provides a huge amount of valuable quantitative, qualitative and demographic data. Through our ‘always on’ Bluepulse continuous listening platform, we engage in collaborative feedback and the evaluation of teaching during a module – not just at the end of it.

In the course of creating this report, Explorance has collaborated with Aarhus University School of Business and Social Sciences, Copenhagen Business School, Emirates Institute for Banking and Financial Studies, Emlyon Executive School, ESA Business School, ESSEC Business School, Grenoble IAE, HEC Paris, IE Business School, IESE Business School, INCAE Business School, McGill University (including Desautels Faculty of Management), Montpellier Business School, Norwegian School of Economics, Presido Graduate School, Simon Business School, Stockholm School of Economics and Villanova University School of Business.

Cross-Section of Institutional Experience

There is, therefore, a wide cross-section of expertise present in the report, with a global focus on management education – and an opportunity for Explorance to support the development of this community. So, we posed the question: how can student voice deliver transformational business and management education?

Our report convenes thinking from academic and professional experts around this issue and covers strategies underpinning student insight. These include differentiated approaches to capturing, and responding to, student feedback; specific challenges and how these are being addressed; best practice case studies on the student voice; and the future for teaching and learning in business and management education – and how student feedback will support this evolution.

Featuring Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University; The University of Newcastle, Australia (Newcastle Business School); Stockholm School of Economics; University of Edinburgh Business School; and School of Business, and the American University in Cairo, I would like to thank everyone who has shared their experiences with us and anyone who would like to join us in the next phase of the conversation.

Be sure to read the full report, and also review the report’s press release.

John Atherton, General Manager (Europe and Africa), Explorance