Put yourself in the shoes of a first-year university student on their first day. You are in a new environment, meeting new people, and learning new things. How do you make sure you have access to the most crucial information you will need, either now or later? In this interview, we sat down with Marjolein Timmers, Assistant Professor in Law & Health Care at Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management (ESHPM), who started an innovation project on improving the onboarding experience of Bachelor students with support from the Community for Learning & Innovation (CLI).
What is the project?
The change in the onboarding procedure that Marjolein and her team undertook has been comprehensive: changing the Canvas channel and pages to which every Bachelor student at ESHPM has access, making insightful videos and animations, as well as incorporating these and more into the kick-off day, introduction week and in education and notifications to students. Throughout all these methods, they wanted to share the crucial information that students will need during their studies. For example, the systems used by the university, such as MyEUR and Osiris, how to register for resits, and who the study advisors are. “We wanted students to know where this information is, so they can find it when they need it”, mentions Marjolein. “We want this to be as easy as possible, so that they can focus their time on their studies, and not on searching for this information. We do not want finding this information to be a make or break factor to whether they are able to succeed with their study.”
The inspiration for the project came following the Senior University Teaching Qualification (SUTQ) trajectory that Marjolein participated in, organised by Risbo and supported by the CLI. During this SUTQ, participants had to come up with a project with which they would improve their educational activities. “Following the SUTQ, I wanted to keep developing the project and actually implement it, so I reached out to the CLI, and managed to do this with their help”, Marjolein explains. She mentions that it is not only her project but has become the project of many. Onboarding is a faculty-wide process, and thus many people have to be involved in developing and implementing it. Moreover, this project was developed with help from Risbo for the educational content, as well as help from the CLI for project management.
Getting students involved
Following the start of the project, Marjolein and her team came up with a lot of ideas for what needed to be changed, and how to change it. However, this was only their perspective. For something as student-focused as onboarding, they also needed the opinions of students. “We organised several focus groups with students, to better understand what their needs are, and what challenges they face when starting university. We also wanted to get their feedback on the changes we were thinking of implementing”, says Marjolein. An example of an improvement that followed the focus groups was accessibility of the information: students mentioned how it was crucial for them that the onboarding information was formatted for their phone when using the Canvas app. An aspect that the team had originally not given much importance to.
From the focus groups, valuable information was then used to develop the new onboarding modules and resources. Information was displayed more efficiently. For example, it is possible to click through relevant topics instead of having to scroll through large texts, and different colours were used for different subject matters to be identified more easily. Moreover, the videos that were made included animations, to approach providing the information in a more memorable way. Groups such as the exam board were also included in the videos, to familiarize the students with who they are, what they do, and when they could be approached. In sharing all this information, Marjolein and her team wanted to be as inclusive as possible and take the students’ communication preferences into consideration. Thus, they chose both written manuals, as well as video materials, to help accommodate more preferences.
Future of the project
For the future of the project, Marjolein emphasizes the fact that onboarding is not necessarily faculty specific, but rather university wide. She mentioned two colleagues from Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences (ESSB) who are also working on improving the onboarding for their students, and thus sees cross-faculty collaboration as a necessary next step. Furthermore, she acknowledges that there is more to onboarding than having efficient information systems in place. There is also a personal aspect, to make sure the student can handle all of these new experiences. She mentions that there are meetings during the mentor programmes where students can talk about how they are experiencing their first year of university, but she sees the need for more to be done in this sense.
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Are you interested in improving student onboarding within your faculty? Or did this article inspire you to request an innovation project for your own innovative ideas? Please visit this page and get in contact with the CLI.
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