Listening to Students’ Views on NSS Data for Quality Enhancement

Abstract

Abstract In the UK, the marketisation of Higher Education (HE) increasingly constructs students as ‘customers’ rather than ‘learners’. Prospective students are faced with an array of published material to enable them to compare and contrast the ‘products’ on offer from UK institutions, including the Government website, Unistats (http://unistats.direct.gov.uk), which provides at-a-glance information about each programme to help inform the choice of university. It can be argued that such marketisation constrains pedagogical aspects of HE provision and renders obscure the responsibilities required of each learner when considering the effectiveness of a programme of learning; raising challenges for managing the expectations of students. This paper examines the challenges to HE Institutions (HEIs) in ensuring that the provision they offer is evaluated and developed in more ways than simply as that of ‘product’. The challenges to be addressed are discussed and a good practice example of using National Student Survey (NSS) data for quality enhancement is detailed.