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Transforming Education with AI and Student Feedback: 8 Essential Takeaways from Explorance Bluenotes Europe 2024

Written by Explorance. December 11, 2024

Explorance Bluenotes Europe 2024, hosted in London last week, and titled ‘’Feedback for the Brave: Transforming Education with AI-Driven Insights and Student Feedback’’, brought together leaders across higher education for another successful exchange of ideas on feedback-based continuous improvement for teaching excellence and student success.

Delegates gained a comprehensive understanding of how feedback analytics informs decision-making, shapes impactful strategies, and enhances overall performance.

This blog highlights eight lessons from the conference.

1. Implement a Framework for Listening to Feedback Within Your Institution

Whether termed a listening strategy or a feedback strategy, every institution should have a proven framework for asking and acting on student comments (and staff, alumni, government, and industry where appropriate).

There are opportunities for universities to take a holistic approach to listening, from course evaluation to the total experience, and through Explorance that supports teaching effectiveness, learning excellence and student experience in HE, and staff engagement in HR. It is vital to listen to demographic insights, behavioural insights and feedback insights, and then act on it.

2. Create Safe Feedback Spaces

In his opening keynote on ‘’Building a Braver Future with Feedback,’’ Explorance CEO Samer Saab discussed the process behind feedback. He outlined the importance of creating safe spaces, including how to give and receive feedback and psychological safety. He summarised that feedback should feel safe and be needed, rewarded, and transformational.

In the context of a challenging external environment for higher education, institutions may wish to be supported in their work to deliver continuous insights which leads to effective transformation and supports institutional success.

3. Never Tell Yourself “I don’t see that my feedback really changes anything” Again

Attendees learned some of the reasons why students do not complete surveys.

45% say they do not see that their feedback really changes anything
43% say they never see the results from the survey (28% only see certain results from the survey)
21% say they never ask the right questions

This insight sets the challenges for student feedback leaders and strategies that amplify the student voice to drive institutional success, and many presentations throughout the two-day conference touched on these issues.

However, closing the loop is considered an underpinning principle for delivering improvement.

4. Include and Empower Students to Give More Feedback Online

Samer returned to the stage for the second conference day with ‘’The Future of Explorance MLY’’.

In another thought-provoking session, he highlighted a ‘Do students feel heard on campus?’ study from Inside Higher Ed revealing that 79% of students do not speak about issues of importance of them. But when they do, they write more than ever. “Many studies demonstrate that online methods increase the word counts in comments by four to seven times,” Samer told delegates. “They express it differently, and are doing so more frequently, more widely, and providing richer insights”.

The opportunity for MLY and analysis of open-ended feedback is, therefore, significant.

5. Leverage Explorance MLY’s Ever-growing Influence

MLY, is transforming the way institutions work with feedback.

107 organisations are now using the AI-powered qualitative analysis solution, which has analysed 11,267,732 comments, generated 35,344,536 insights, and supported 4,995,458 improvements.

And the breadth of application is growing too. The University of Westminster has already contributed to an in-depth case study on MLY, but a more recent development is its use for their Future Ready Mentoring initiative which is designed to enhance students’ employability via three distinct programs.

Survey text responses were fed into MLY for thematic analysis ensuring “rapid qualitative and meaningful output” and “supporting the University’s approach on employability”.

6. Get Inspired by Explorance Blue’s Versatility

It is not just MLY that is being used more widely.

Kingston University has tapped into the full potential of Explorance Blue as a student experience insight platform, specifically to support the institution’s Graduation Experience Survey.

The University achieved a 16.4% increase in response rates to the survey which is sent to graduates on the evening of their ceremony, and importantly enabled in-ceremony enhancements as a result.

Meanwhile, Bath Spa University is using Blue as a multi-rater tracker for postgraduate research students, and London Business School for pre-course skill and competency tracking.

7. Do Deeper Thinking, Get Memorable Insights

Throughout the conference, attendees and Explorance had a compelling combination of keynote speeches, panel discussions and university presentations.

Christina Bifulco, Associate Director for Teaching and Learning Analytics at Rutgers University, highlighted the opportunities around leveraging Generative AI for actionable data, including how it “enabled a focus on evidence-based decision-making”.

In a panel on Quantitative vs. Qualitative Insights in Student Feedback, Cardiff University’s Maksymilian Karczmar challenged whether the session title should actually be ‘versus’ or ‘and’, and said qualitative feedback “provided the narrative behind what students think”, whilst one of Explorance’s newest MLY customers Heriot-Watt University, also gave their insights.

8. Welcome Great Customer Feedback

Explorance Bluenotes Europe is a fantastic platform to engage with partners professionally and socially.

Explorance always welcomes customer feedback, but this quote used by the University of Manchester in their Manchester and MLY presentation felt extra special. “The new NSS analysis worked extremely well and felt like a significant breakthrough. The analysis was insightful, well structured, accessible and timely which led to much greater engagement on the day of the results and in the weeks that followed. I have heard nothing but positive comments” (Professor April McMahon, Vice-President Teaching, Learning and Students). Thank you Manchester, and all conference presenters!

What’s Next for Higher Education and the Future of Student Feedback?

With the launch of Explorance MLY 3.0 coming in January, further innovations are on their way, including multi-lingual analysis and display (with 29 languages supported).

There will be more coverage for the Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) and Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES), and overall deeper student life and teaching effectiveness insights.

Additional advancements will follow in the next version of MLY in Spring 2025.

The Explorance EMEA community also has three major events coming up, which are now open for registration: