How Brunel Leveraged evasys as a Key Component of a Centralised Strategy

In 2014, Brunel University London launched a strategy that aimed to improve teaching across the university and move the institution up the rankings in the annual National Student Survey (NSS).

As part of the overall strategy, the decision was taken to create a consistent, university-wide approach to module review and lecturer evaluation and evasys was the partner chosen to move the institution over to a centralised, digital system for surveys.

In addition to providing a robust solution for evaluation, use of evasys also highlighted some upstream challenges in institutional processes that needed to be addressed.

Issues in the Wider Picture

The process of implementing evasys drew attention to several wider issues; these are explained by Dr Ian Dear, Brunel’s Dean of Students in 2016 though the video presentation at the foot.

Issues included:

Diverse data collection systems. Every department, and sometimes every academic within that department, had a different way of evaluating teaching and analysing the data received. Clearly, this created challenges when comparing results across the whole university and made data analytics impossible.
Not closing the feedback loop. In many cases, students never saw the survey results, which had a real knock on effect on transparency and engagement.
Staff workload. Every department had a member of staff spending around a month of their time handing out and managing surveys.
Legal risk. With confusion about what constituted “anonymous” and “confidential” data collection, there was a real risk of issues with data protection.
Lack of efficiency. With 50,000 pieces of paper being handled manually for every survey prior to the evasys solution, the time and money was spent was substantial.