Understanding Student Experience: A Pathways Model

As universities increasingly teach at scale, new challenges are introduced and compounded where students are offered greater choice. A key challenge is to maintain an understanding of the student experience within the huge increase in variations in student study path. This understanding is necessary to provide feedback to both faculty and students, and institutionally for the enhancement of quality. This is the first description of one fresh approach to this challenge. Whilst based on the experience within a large distance learning university, the findings are relevant to all institutions working at scale. Moving from a traditional relational structure to a multi-model database makes it possible to quickly design study path queries to explore the richness of available data. We provide an overview of this approach that could be applied by other universities and higher education institutions where data is not being fully utilised.