Case study: Welcome Week

Department(s) / colleagues involved

Welcome Team in the International Student Office

Colleagues from every academic and professional service have been involved through nominated Welcome Representatives

Our aim was to …

Manage the design and organisation of a coherent, inclusive, vibrant and distinctively Warwick Welcome and Welcome Week that meets students’ expectations and needs. Welcome Week aims to enable all new students to: settle into university life; make friends; understand what is expected of them as students on a degree programme; understand the breadth of Warwick’s offer (opportunities and support) and how to access it; learn their way around; adapt to life in a new country/environment; and be prepared for day one of term. By offering Welcome Week to all new students, across all nationalities and study levels, we are aiming to increase student inclusivity and integration and optimise opportunities for friendship making and networking.

What we did …

We recruited 111 Welcome Representatives from all interested and affected academic and professional service departments and the Students’ Union and invited them to a series of initial design workshops. Here we gathered thousands of ideas of activities, events, and messages that could happen during Welcome and Welcome Week under a series of themes. We also gathered a long list of challenges facing teams and the University generally with the addition of Welcome Week.

Next, we looked at each submitted idea and grouped them into one of four areas dependent on their topic: finding your way, community building, academic induction, and independence. These four then became workstreams of our overarching Welcome Week Project, with a dedicated project manager from our Welcome Team. At a team away day we ensured that across and between our workstreams we were ‘MECE’ (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) – ensuring we covered all bases without duplicating workload.

Each workstream then held topic-specific workshops and focus groups with students. Initial workshops simply reviewed ideas from our design workshops, using the MoSCoW method (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have). We then held a series of co-design workshops with students and staff to develop a detailed understanding of what teams would be asked to deliver during Welcome Week.

Through a series of follow-up conversations with academic and professional service departments we were able to develop a series of project outputs, each presented to the Welcome Steering Group for sign-off:

• Academic Induction Framework – to guide academic department provision, outlining minimum expectations from students and to restrict some provision in line with feedback
• Community Building, Finding Your Way, Independence activity/event list – list of events and key messages for all students and for specific demographics under each theme
• Financial Requirements ­– detailed understanding of costs associated with Welcome Week
• Risk Registers – risks and planned mitigations associated with Welcome (Arrivals) Weekend and Welcome Week
• Gantt Chart – a detailed project plan of activities and processes required to make Welcome Week a success
• Communications Plan – a detailed communications plan, utilising a range of student-relevant channels with appropriate, timely, and relevant content. We’re consciously managing University communications during this period in order to actively reduce the volume and duplication of content

Working with IT Services we developed functionality to support the scheduling and timetabling view of Welcome Week. This enabled stakeholders to request time and space for Welcome Week and helped us allocate these c.1,000 events whilst also building the interactive student-view of Welcome Week.

The outcome has been …

A coherently designed Welcome experience that meets students’ needs and expectations.

A real opportunity to showcase opportunities and services to students whilst allowing them time to transition into independent living at Warwick.

The benefit/impact has been …

Meeting years’ worth of student feedback and requests for a Welcome Week

Providing more time for students to settle into life at Warwick, to learn their way around, to understand what is expected of them on their degrees, and to understand what support is available to them. In doing so, we’re offering a more consistent transition experience for all students regardless of degree discipline.

Significant reduction in duplicated communications and activity, saving time and money whilst also presenting a more accessible offer to students

This supports the Education Strategy by …

Providing a platform to showcase student experience opportunities and support services available at Warwick

Demonstrating responsiveness to student feedback

A genuine enhancement to our student experience offer: a week very much devoted to student experience that has deliberately sought to cut through duplications and silo working in order to deliver a consistent offer, regardless of the department a student is studying in.

The response of students / staff has been …

Students: very positive, excitement, and a general eagerness to be involved

Staff: the introduction of Welcome Week has presented challenges and opportunities to different staff teams. We’ll soon be in a position of complete clarity around who is doing what and hope that this allays any outstanding concerns. We have nonetheless had excellent engagement from staff throughout the planning process.

Our next steps will be …

To confirm our evaluation plans to understand how we will know whether Welcome Week has been a success. We continue to maintain a Lessons Log from our project management approach and this tool, combined with our evaluation will inform preparations for Welcome 2019.

To find out more, you can contact …

Welcome2018@warwick.ac.uk

Other information about this case study

Is available on the Welcome Website: www.warwick.ac.uk/welcome2018 or by emailing the team.