AUA Blog

Student Communities

At the University of Sheffield we are in the preparatory phase of a project to evaluate the ways in which student communities develop on campus, and how these enrich the student experience in its broadest sense.   

By communities we are thinking of social networks, the experience of community in academic departments, virtual communities like facebook, student societies, faith based groups, community-building in our residences, etc.  Issues around student interface with the local (city) community are not the primary focus, but I suspect we will need to reference these in some way within the work.

I am aware of considerable US research on the concept of student community development, including some use of the "College and University Community Inventory", developed within NASPA.

I am keen to make contact with colleagues here who are already working on, or considering work on, this issue.  If you could contact me off-list, that would be extremely helpful.

Thanks in anticipation.

Andrew West

Director of Student Services, The University of Sheffield

a.west@sheffield.ac.uk

Have you used student Focus Groups?

I work for the Student Services department at the University of Brighton, and we’ve been reviewing our feedback mechanisms.  As well as the normal feedback questionnaires, comment boxes and wider surveys, we’re wondering if it might be useful to hold some student focus groups.

I think the main purpose of the groups would be to dig deeper into the perceptions of our services - and perhaps to inform future strategies and marketing styles.  We tend to find that once people are through the door, they’re usually pleasantly surprised with our services, but it’s the dreaded non-users that we find more difficult to survey.

I was wondering if anyone had any experience of using groups in a similar way to inform services, and if they’d been successful.  Another option would be to rename the group something like “student marketing forum” so that students could feel like they were gaining marketing skills that might look good on their CVs.

I’d also be interested to learn how students were recruited to focus groups to try and get a balanced perspective.  Did bribery work?

If you’d prefer to email me away from the main blog, you’re very welcome.

Thanks

Annie