NSS 2021 - Thank you for taking part
Earlier this year, over 3,000 final year students completed the National Student Survey.
The results were published nationally this week, and we want to take the opportunity to say thank you to final year students for the feedback given through the survey. We are working through the data for each course, each department and for the University overall but we can already see a number of helpful themes emerging.
Overall results
At Warwick, our results are overall very positive. Our Overall Satisfaction score is 83.2%, this still places us third in the Russell Group and 13th in the sector (all universities across the UK).
We are first for Assessment and Feedback within the Russell Group. In this year of unprecedented change, this is a testament to your tenacity to quickly adapt to online assessments.
We are in the top two in the Russell Group for Academic Support, Organisation & Management, Learning Resources and Student Voice. And in three areas, we are in the top 16 in the sector: Teaching, Organisation and Management, and Student Voice.
We have focused on delivering an excellent teaching and learning experience this year, despite the circumstances, so we’re pleased to see good results overall in this area. The results have given us a lot to think about regarding specific courses and departments. Each course team is working through responses to the survey, including the helpful comments on what is working well and what needs to change. They will be sharing the results with Course Reps for the year ahead and agreeing on the action to take in response. 85% of final year students are satisfied overall with teaching; so much of our action will be about building on and refining the best bits of a Warwick education. This is encouraging as we end a difficult year in which your patience, commitment and hard work have helped us to ensure your achievement this year and for final years, graduate with your degree this summer (even if the on-campus celebrations have to wait a while).
The results showed that we need to do more to help you feel part of a community of staff and students. Previous year groups have told us the same and we introduced a dedicated Welcome Week to help address this right from the start of each new student’s time at Warwick. We know the necessary move to delivering more teaching online this year may have had an impact here. We’ll review the comments in detail and continue to work on improvements in this area.
The survey also tells us that we need to communicate changes to courses more effectively. Beyond this, we know that studying across departments – either on a joint degree or just by taking optional modules – is not as straightforward as it can be. We have invested in a number of major projects to improve the organisation and administration of our courses, so that we use one system across departments and everything that a student needs to access is in one place. For example, we have increased the use of Moodle for more modules and we have introduced a new Module Catalogue. In 2020/21 67% of modules had a list in Talis Aspire and additional e-books were acquired to support students learning remotely. We aim to build on this success and increase engagement with Talis Aspire in 2021/22 to further improve the student learning experience.
We can see there’s more we can do to provide you with the resources you need to support your learning. We’ve heard this previously and have taken action including the Library’s More Books - Your Books campaign which was a direct response to NSS feedback that there were insufficient course texts. We’ll work with teams across the University to look at how we can take action and improve.
Next steps
We are looking forward to working through the rest of the feedback in the survey. For those of you who will still be with us next year, you will hear more about the changes we will make in response to it. In fact, many of you will be contributing to new developments through SSLCs or by feeding into projects. If you have ideas for improving your course or a service provided by the University in the meantime, make sure to tell your Course Rep or Students’ Union officers about it, or put yourself forward to fill one of those roles over the next year and help us to make your ideas a reality. For those of you who have already made a difference through representation and participation: many thanks for doing so!
