Human centred design to improve student experience
Client:
La Trobe UniversityChallenge:
- A need to improve student connections, a sense of belonging, and overall experience
- No clear definition or understanding of current student experience during peak periods
- A need to solve the business problem of using too many human resources to support peak periods (orientation and first week of semester) and understand issues impacting on a positive student experience
Solution:
- Human Centred Design (HCD) and Agile delivery to address La Trobe student needs and explore emergent technology as an opportunity to augment effort
- Innovative techniques helped uncover pain points previously masked by the number of staff providing support during peak periods
- A cross-functional, collaborative, and self-organising team co-designed the best possible service for students
Results:
- La Trobe students engaged throughout the discovery and design process and as part of project team
- Agile delivery with iterative development facilitated an outcome every sprint
- Co-designing potential solutions with students and staff ensures high relevance and chance of success and the ability to challenge the existing business model
La Trobe University is a teaching and research university with seven campuses across Australia serving over 38,000 students. 52 years young, the latest Times Higher Education ranking put La Trobe as 7th in Australia and 2nd in Victoria, with their research ranked in the top 1.2% of world’s universities. With a primary goal to deliver a consistently high quality experience for all students, La Trobe University aspires to be number one in Victoria for high quality student experience and learning outcomes by 2022.
Challenge
While student experience is a core part of the La Trobe University philosophy, there was no clear definition of what the current aspiration was for key peak period support over orientation periods and the start of each semester.
In parallel, a significant business problem facing the Higher Education sector in Australia is the census period dropout rate. Reducing the dropout rate has substantial positive revenue impact and La Trobe knew that improved student experience through peak periods could help influence this metric.
The other key objective of this initiative was to explore emerging technologies that could be applied to improving the student experience.
Solution
La Trobe engaged DXC Technology as a strategic partner to help define and focus on improving student experience during peak periods so they felt more connected and engaged with an improved sense of belonging at the university.
Leveraging DXC’s unique Digital Transformation Centre (DTC) methodology and approach, a seven-week engagement was delivered to gain deep insights into student experience. DTCs form part of a global network of centres and leverage Human Centred Design (HCD) for improved results.
The HCD approach allowed the project uninhibited collaboration across the university with hundreds of students and over 15+ organisational units involved in the co-creation of a proposed future.
The DXC Consulting DTC team introduced La Trobe to a new way of working by applying innovative techniques to uncover pain points that may previously have been masked by additional resources during peak periods.
A Strategic Capability and Student Journey Roadmap Assessment was completed and presented to executive sponsors. With more than 1,000 data points and 190 ideas generated, the DTC team articulated four common themes that would help improve student experience during peak periods.
From those four themes, a co-creation stage with students, staff, and other key stakeholders conceived six potential solutions broadly impacting three areas: people and culture; tools and technology; and physical space.
Co-creation was essential to ensure solutions were not only relevant and desirable, but also feasible and viable to implement.
Results
The biggest learning from this initiative was the power of co-creation through the principles of the DTC and HCD to ensure engagement. Students felt excited and valued to be part of the journey, and both professional and academic staff appreciated their active involvement throughout discovery and design.
By following a HCD approach and engaging as many students as possible to support and learn from, the project’s recommendations were extremely well received during concept testing.
Accompanying the recommendations was a comprehensive insights report listing the many pain points and motivations the team identified during the contextual inquiries.
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