University of Cape Town Speeds Up Analysis of Open-ended Feedback in SASSE Using Explorance MLY

Montreal, January 21, 2025 – Using Explorance MLY for the analysis of open-ended feedback in one of South Africa’s biggest national student surveys will shorten the turnaround time “from many months to a matter of days” at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

Having initially selected Explorance Blue in 2023, UCT ran course evaluations for the first set of courses in November that year, and work started in 2024 on a new Course Evaluations Policy and Practices Project. In the meantime, a need emerged around analysis of free-text comments in the South African Survey of Student Engagement (SASSE), which gathers comprehensive information from university students relating to high-impact experiences and behaviours identified as having an influence on the teaching and learning experience.

With Explorance MLY on UCT’s radar from the course evaluations project, Deputy Director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching Stephen Marquard began a conversation on its potential for increasing the actionable use of student comments, initially in SASSE, and in turn UCT became the first South African university to adopt MLY.

“In parallel to the course evaluations programme, during 2023 we put a lot of effort into promoting the SASSE and getting good response rates,” Stephen said. “This was successful, as we got a large volume of comments back, but we got stuck on analysing open-ended student feedback. We were in a position where we had lots of qualitative input, much more than we expected, over 100 pages, and whilst we took the decision to break this down for faculties to analyse, there was still lots to digest for everyone.

“Students were putting in the effort to tell us what they think in the SASSE across all aspects of the campus experience, and we were not giving justice to that in making sure that decision-makers on campus were getting the feedback promptly and in an easily digestible form. We know that students provide high-quality feedback when they believe it counts, and so when we ran the SASSE again, we wanted to give a message to students that it really does matter what they say, and MLY brought home the real possibility to provide decision-makers with very quick access to results with the potential for prompt action in response.

“When we run the next SASSE later in 2025, MLY will shorten the timeframe for analysing qualitative feedback from many months to a matter of days. With the potential to use this in course evaluations and institutional cohort surveys too, MLY is an important part of our infrastructure for student voice and decision-making.”

Stephen also outlined next steps for Explorance and UCT over the next 12 months. “We are planning to use the Blue dashboard for longitudinal views, and by extension MLY has the potential to give us qualitative insights across time and courses as appropriate, including sentiment in faculty, which can be measurably reflected in successive surveys,” he said. “We also want to integrate some student background and demographic data into the dashboard, and explore results at different levels, including through department and Faculty-level reports. Underpinning all of this is building a culture of consistent use of evidence in institutional quality assurance, and department and programme reviews.”

John Atherton, VP Sales EMEA at Explorance, said: “We are delighted to make the University of Cape Town our first MLY customer in South Africa, and even more delighted to see the immediate impact in its application to the SASSE.”

About Explorance

Explorance empowers organizations with next-generation feedback analytics to accelerate the insight-to-action cycle, encouraging the philosophy of “Feedback for the brave” to drive purpose, impact, and growth.    

Bringing 20 years of expertise, Explorance, a trusted partner for 25% of Fortune 100 companies and 35% of the world’s top higher education institutions, influences over 25 million individuals with award-winning solutions like Blue, Metrics That Matter, and MLY.     

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