Page 7 - CT Innovation in Education, November 2021

management. In many cases, they’ve turned to Qualtrics tools and services — which they’re already deeply familiar with on the academic research side — for wrangling that data. There were hundreds of thousands of new instruments being created on Qualtrics by schools during this time.
Colleges and universities should keep the momentum going by extending those regular touchpoints to make
them more thorough, uncovering insights about student experience in and out of the classroom — about mental health, about how the various learning modalities are going, about instructor feedback, about career and advisor support, about participation in campus life and extracurriculars,
and about so many of the other areas that make college memorable and worth attending.
When you create an instrument with the Qualtrics XM platform, you can easily distribute it via every channel, using student-specific links to get information that’s relevant to individuals, whose unique journey you can then better manage.
Plus, by approaching experience management as a platform versus a project, you can apply it not just to the student experience, but also to faculty and staff, to also improve employee engagement in limitless ways.
XM: The Crucial Data Set!
Higher ed institutions must improve at putting experience programs in place to ensure student success. That entails understanding how people are feeling; gathering sentiment data en masse; recognizing that they’re more than just
a row in a gradebook, or a graduation or job placement metric. They are individuals having daily experiences in and out of the classroom that are highly variable and that will shape their outcomes in life.
And I hasten to add that understanding these experiences is even more critical where the gaps are the biggest, in addressing the needs of students of color, low-income, and those who are first-generation or non-traditional.
Let’s close these gaps by embracing student experience as a crucial data set. And by embracing an experience management platform as a newly vital piece of your institution’s tech stack.
Omar Garriott is the Global Industry Leader for education at Qualtrics. Omar has spent his career helping lead education verticals within Adobe, Apple, LinkedIn and Salesforce. In
his current role, he helps schools revolutionize the academic experience and boost engagement with students and faculty.
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