VP Education Kate Roberts gives you important information on how you can feed back to the University to let them know of any aspects in your educational experience that you think work well, or need to be improved.
As your VP Education, my role is to represent your academic interests and to ensure your feedback is utilised to improve your educational experience at Royal Holloway. One of the main ways this feedback is collated is through our academic representation system where your reps are a key driver behind making positive changes to your courses, departments, and schools.
Every year these impacts are getting bigger and better and you can read more about the work they are doing here. We have seen a fantastic level of engagement from academic reps collating feedback from the wider student body and representing your academic interests to the University.
In 2018 we launched a new system of academic representation with further updates made at the start of the 2019 year to reflect the new school structure and our Democracy Review, including the introduction of school reps. These new school rep positions also sit on our Education Executive, a committee of student representatives responsible for shaping and directing the improvement of education and academic experience at Royal Holloway.
These updates to academic representation have resulted in some major positive changes – something I’m going to be talking about in more detail later so keep an eye on your email inbox.
Why am I telling you this?
It is clear that there is an appetite for students to constantly feed back, and with both the National Student Survey (NSS) and Undergraduate Survey opening today, you have a great opportunity to let the University know about all aspects of your educational experience. This might include learning resources, quality of teaching, organisation of your course, and even how we as a Students’ Union represent you.
What are the surveys used for?
Both the NSS and the Undergraduate Survey allow the University to make informed, data-driven decisions about how to move forward in the future and improve your educational experience, it also allows the Students’ Union to represent you effectively.
Myself and the Student Voice team analyse NSS data from all 21 departments at the start of each academic year, consolidating this information into factsheets for our department reps to understand where individual departments need to improve and allow them to represent their cohort more comprehensively.
This has enabled our academic reps to be proactive in addressing your concerns, being able to prioritise the key issues within your department. This has led to positive impacts from reps such as working with their department to make class sizes smaller so students receive more attention from their tutor, improving the quality of online resources, fixing timetabling issues and organising revision sessions!
Both the NSS and the Undergraduate Survey are really useful ways of giving feedback, which enables us to analyse problems and then address them, but if you have any immediate issues, please get in contact with your course/department/school rep. Alternatively, you can pop into the Students’ Union for a chat or drop me an email at vpeducation@su.rhul.ac.uk.
Complete the NSS survey
Complete the Undergraduate Survey
Kate Roberts // Vice President Education