How the University of Brighton Saved 4 Weeks on Comment Analysis with Explorance MLY

About the University of Brighton

The University of Brighton is an inclusive, ambitious institution with a strong commitment to transforming lives through education. Rooted in the distinctive character of Brighton & Hove, the University combines technical knowledge with applied learning and the human skills graduates need to navigate a rapidly changing world. Around 20,000 students are based across its three Brighton campuses. The University aims to nurture the professionals and leaders of tomorrow while making a positive impact on the people, organisations and communities it serves.

The Challenge: Bringing Module Feedback Together

For many years, module evaluation at Brighton was managed locally. Across its campuses and disciplines, staff collected feedback in different ways and at different times. The challenge of inconsistent approaches made it difficult to build a picture of students’ experiences across the University.

In 2019, Brighton began looking for a system that could establish a common process while accommodating the varied ways its modules are taught. It also wanted to make the resulting feedback available as a source of evidence to academic teams for action planning.

“The requirement to build a centralised module evaluation survey was the main goal in looking for a supplier,” recalled Insight Manager Penny Jones, who has worked at Brighton for more than 20 years. “Our university has three campuses and lots of different disciplines, and staff were doing their module evaluations in very different ways. It was quite hard to manage and didn’t give the University any centralised data to use, and was resource intensive.”

The Solution: A Centralised Approach with Blue, Expanded by MLY

Brighton selected Explorance Blue and began rolling it out in 2020. “We felt that Explorance Blue matched our very bespoke needs,” Penny explained. “It was more sophisticated and could cope with our non-standard processes and provision. That flexibility has been important in designing the evaluation process. Because teaching does not begin and end at the same time for every module, module leaders choose the evaluation period that best suits their teaching.”

Blue now underpins Brighton’s standardised module evaluation process across approximately 1,600 modules on its three campuses. The University sends around 65,000 module evaluation invitations each year, and students may receive an invitation more than once during the year. “We’ve definitely fulfilled the goals that we were trying to achieve,” Penny said. “We have a standardised, centralised module evaluation system and process, which is no mean feat. Blue has a reporting front end, which means that a lot of things can be automated. It has helped us to create consistent processes within our own institution.”

The platform gives Brighton a source of feedback it can draw on when exploring questions that cut across courses or disciplines. “We have another data source that we can pull from when we’re interested in, for example, what students think about assessment and feedback processes,” Penny revealed. “Blue is brilliant. It has allowed us to explore data at a level not accessible in the past.”

As part of its expansion, Blue now also supports other survey activity at the University. Brighton has used it for a student skills audit and a staff pulse survey, drawing on its integrations with institutional data and its reporting capabilities. Penny described the staff data integration as “fantastic”, as this enables her team to access the information needed for reporting without handling the full underlying staff dataset.

As the volume of comments grew, Brighton also sought a faster way to analyse free-text feedback. The University introduced Explorance MLY to help categorise comments from its surveys, including the National Student Survey (NSS). “We’ve always been really interested in finding ways to automate free-text coding because it does take up a lot of time,” Penny commented. “We’re very interested in getting more value out of the huge amounts of free text that you get through module evaluation.”

The dedicated MLY NSS model has been particularly useful because its themes reflect the structures Brighton already uses when reporting those results. “The NSS custom model that Explorance introduced was a game changer for me,” Penny said. “It meant that I could put the comments in and get something sensible out that was reflective of the structures we use internally. The model came about through collaboration with sector partners and hence is really helpful.”

The Impact: Consistent Feedback and Stronger Evidence for Decisions

Brighton now runs two student surveys and one staff survey through Blue. Its centralised module evaluation process has created a consistent source of student feedback where previously there was no University-wide dataset. Blue’s reporting and integrations have also helped the team establish processes that can be reused across other surveys.

In the past year, Brighton uploaded around 40,000 comments for analysis in MLY and expects that figure to more than double in the 2026-27 academic year. “Manually coding NSS comments would previously have taken about a week,” Penny said. “With MLY, preparation can take around two hours and the comments themselves can be processed in minutes. I anticipate that I will save at least four weeks’ work.”

The University is also bringing evidence from different sources together for its senior leadership team. “I’ve written a number of reports utilising data we’ve collected through Explorance and other student voice mechanisms, such as the NSS,” Penny elaborated. “In the past, we were analysing one dataset and giving the key insights for that. Now it’s much easier to cut across all our datasets and look at the key messages coming out of the numbers, the free text and the different sources. That is pivotal in delivering to our Executive Board what they need for decision-making.”

Survey findings also feed into Brighton’s academic quality assessment process, and the development of action plans. Those plans are produced through the wider quality process rather than generated directly by Blue or MLY. Looking ahead, Brighton plans to run staff surveys through Blue, with interim and automated end-of-survey reporting. Penny also wants to use MLY’s employee feedback model to analyse the free-text responses and continue improving engagement with module evaluations.

She particularly values the support available as the team develops its approach. “Explorance is very supportive and customer-focused,” Penny stated. “Having relationships with an external network has been really helpful, They also facilitate spaces where we can be in touch with other universities and ask, ‘How did you do this?’. I have not experienced the development of user communities at this level before. Explorance does a really good job of creating that wider network and hosting training sessions and regular summits. I regularly attend Explorance events, including the Europe Summit and Student Voices in Higher Education Conference. We even had the opportunity to host Bluenotes Europe (now Europe Summit) in 2023. That, and continuing to be a regular at events, is good for our University’s profile and reputation I feel.”

For Penny, the partnership has provided both a centralised foundation for listening to students and the flexibility to keep developing how Brighton uses the feedback. “Technically, Blue is a great product,” she concluded. “It can do pretty much anything we want it to. There’s a great team and a community of users around it. I would definitely recommend Explorance.”