University of West London switches to Explorance Blue and MLY to improve survey insights

The University of West London (UWL) has commissioned Explorance Blue and Explorance MLY to support its commitment to student success.

UWL was ranked Number 1 London university for overall student satisfaction in the National Student Survey 2024, and the Best University for Student Experience and Teaching Quality in the UK in The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2024; and guided by its ambitious strategic plan, Impact 2028, has a number of objectives to meet under its strategic goal for ‘Promoting student success and lifelong learning’.

Sara Raybould, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education and Student Experience) at UWL, explained:

“We pride ourselves on delivering career-focused courses with excellent teaching in a campus designed for a great student experience. In recent years we have gained national recognition for the quality of our student experience, but we are always looking to innovate. With our ‘Promoting student success’ goal, we wanted a better way to survey our students. Our previous system was clunky, it took a huge amount of work, and was largely not fit for purpose. We saw Blue/MLY as a good opportunity, had a demo twice, and moved to purchase them. The partnership with Explorance will give us more evidence-based data to work with, and the platforms will also be used for staff surveys.”

Module evaluation pilot surveys through Blue will begin before Easter, whilst MLY is currently being used to analyse data from the first semester.

Dr Kostas Tzortzis, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Strategy, Performance and Analytics) and Director of Strategic Planning and Data Services at UWL, commented:

“We have already centralised some surveys and Explorance can support this by giving us a consistent view of activity and how we listen and act on feedback. We generally undertake mid-module evaluations, though some courses have more than one evaluation, but with Blue we will also expand the scope of our surveys to course-level activity, combining our course and module reporting. Through MLY we will undertake more qualitative data collection, and make better use of the intel we gather. Explorance brings a more effective way of doing things than our previous system: we have an opportunity to implement a better tool with more functionality.”

Whilst underlining the platform for a number of “quick wins”, Dr Tzortzis also presented the future direction. “Long-term we want to better engage academics with multiple information from Blue and MLY, and through advanced reporting achieve internal development,” he said. “Blue will reduce the manual work and repetition of work, and enable us to have more focus on how we structure data and get the insights we need more quickly. With open-ended comment analysis in MLY we have the ability to separate positive and negative sentiments. There is nothing else like it in the sector that is trained by other universities, and that sector knowledge sets MLY apart from a general AI platform.”

Sara added:

“Student voice is inextricably linked to the National Student Survey (NSS) and the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). We use surveys to gauge how students are thinking for NSS, and with TEF, you have part data, part contextualised narrative, so the partnership with Explorance will support that. We have led excellence in student experience for a while now, but over time we have aspirations to produce research papers and collate that thinking as an academic subject. However, the priority for us right now is to ensure students feel empowered and that they are part of a community. Constant voice is needed, because it is only through feedback that you ever improve.”

John Atherton, VP Sales EMEA at Explorance, commented:

“We are delighted to welcome the University of West London into the Explorance community. Blue and MLY will enable UWL to capture student feedback at a number of levels, and produce reports which facilitate analysis of, and learning from, the responses received. We want our work to add real value for students and staff, and to make a difference to the institution in relation to targets they have set strategically around promoting student success.”