Students, Power and Excellence

On an early train to London at the moment on route to JISC Stakeholder meeting, more on that later.

Yesterday was a real roller coaster day of meetings, I had 8! That will teach me to go away for a week.

In the morning I went to a consultation event with the Vice Chancellor and a good cross section of staff about our current review of our strategic plan, and the topic was The Student Experience. Some interesting presentation with some quite provocative ideas. By focusing on putting current students at the heart of everything, are we failing to meet the needs of other stakeholders, for example employers? Are we giving students what they want, rather than what they need? They want easy As, but they need a good education. What will the University of the future look like, and how will developments in technology change the way we teach?A very good session, with some excellent group discussions. One theme that emerged was the need to look at how we transition students from school to University, and also the need to radically review the way we teach to increase our flexibility to deal with non standard students and courses, which are increasingly becoming standard.

As well as updates on projects for which I am sponsor, I also caught up on an incident last week, where some electrical work caused us to loose power to one of our data centres. Because of the nature of the fault, the generator didn't kick in, correctly, so we ran on our UPS for 40 minutes, which had 3 minutes left when colleagues got the power restored. I think we can class that as a near miss.

Recently we launched our Customer Service Strategy which comes out of a lot of work we did last year within the department. Looking at the results of our recent staff survey, it's obvious that we do provide excellent customer service in some areas, but as in all things, there is always some room for improvement, and that's what we'll be working on this year.




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