• Swindon & Wiltshire Education, training and skills
• Thursday August 22 2024
• Author Name: Peter Davison

UWE Bristol adopts AI tool to analyse student feedback

UWE Bristol has adopted AI tool Explorance MLY to analyse student feedback.

The university will use MLY to process feedback gathered by sources including the National Student Survey and Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey as well as from its own programme evaluations.

MLY is described by its developers as “a revolutionary advancement in the field of feedback analytics.” Aimed at universities, it uses machine learning to distil data-driven actionable feedback from huge amounts of unstructured comments.

With over 39,900 students and 3,800 staff, UWE Bristol is one of the largest providers of higher education in South-West England – and having moved to an institutional-level focus on course surveys, as well as in-module feedback, a different approach was needed to collect overarching student feedback on each programme.

“We want to be able to drill down into qualitative feedback given by students – and through MLY we are able to do that in a smarter, quicker way,” said Heather Moyes, academic registrar at UWE Bristol.

“As part of our new approach to surveys, we were aware that higher response rates would bring a lot more free-text comments, which meant we needed a different solution.

“The tool we used previously – nothing as sophisticated as MLY – was not used extensively in the institution and ultimately the licence was not renewed, so we had to analyse qualitative feedback ourselves through our own manual coding which took a long time.

“Now, rather than spending lots of time finding out what students are telling us, MLY allows us to focus on what we do about it.”

John Atherton, VP Sales EMEA at Explorance, said: “MLY helps higher education institutions to make data-informed decisions that enhance the student experience.

“The development of teaching methods and course content following evaluation of their insights can lead to increased student satisfaction and engagement.

“The software also captures employee experience and employee learning insights.”

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