UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE | melisportfolio

University of Newcastle - Research and Student Experience

Research and Experience Design

I was asked to conduct a research on current student challenges, researcher needs and University staff ways of working in order to enhance the overall student experience and suggest strategic recommendation with a road map of initiatives.

Category:

Research, CX, strategic design

About this project

University of Newcastle is an ambitious local university with strong desire to implement their 5 to 7 years digital transformation strategy.

My role was to look into the overall University life including student and staff experiences to come up with solutions and strategic recommendations as part of their digital transformation agenda.

I conducted interviews with the students and University staff to understand the student life cycle from on boarding to post graduation, identified student's challenges, spoke to University staff to find out about their ways of working and lastly completed a generic review of trends in higher education.

I came up with short term and long term initiatives to implement an enhanced the campus life:

-New Student/Researcher/Staff experience.

I worked collaboratively with Data and AI team to suggest efficient solutions such as a student assistant tool and developed a CRM strategy delivering 360 view of the student for personalised learning experience.

Challenges

I quickly became quiet passionate about the Higher Education sector but the challenging part was adapting to the local university culture. We had to spend some time with the broader stakeholder team to gain their trust and agree on new ways of working.

The University's teams have worked in silos in the past which resulted as multiple systems and technologies running at the same time and disconnected. It was a complex technical landscape as a starting point.

Successful Outcomes

Research findings and alignment workshops provided a common understanding of the priorities to define the next streams of work.

Came up with 16 initiatives to implement in short and longer term.

Student assistant tool was well received and provided increased student engagement.