Improve response times
Staff are much more responsive to feedback and deal with issues before they worsen as often happens if they aren’t flagged until the next Staff Student Consultative Committee meeting.
Inform SSCC meetings
One of the Programme Administrators at UCL Engineering mentioned they are using Unitu to prepare for SSCC meetings by engaging students, and resolving some of issues even before the meeting itself; they then append Unitu logs to SSCC minutes.
Improve transparency
During the course of the pilot Graham Roberts identified other advantages: ‘Another important benefit is that once an issue is raised all students can see the responses and how an issue has been resolved, making things a lot more transparent.’
Students have been particularly positive about much improved response times and far greater transparency when it comes to making decisions. Collecting feedback transparently across the whole student community has also helped empower Student Reps to reach out and engage their respective student cohorts more effectively.
After the initial pilot project with Computer Science, five more departments in the Faculty of Engineering Sciences following the same process of adoption. These six departments have around 4,000 students. By the end of the year the platform had recorded 34,331 interactions (views, posts and votes) with 2,190 students engaging and 87 staff across the faculty responding to the feedback; this is a steep increase in participation compared to traditional forms of communication and the improvement in NSS scores in those departments reflect this.