Raises the bar for students with one-touch admin and personalised support

If students vote you the best UK university, you know you are doing something right.

The 2024/2025 Uni Compare rankings also confirmed Nottingham Trent University, (NTU) as first in the UK for employability and course quality – clear evidence that its 40,000-strong student body are proud of what their university has to offer.

There's plenty of variety in the learning environments at NTU too, from traditional architecture at the city centre campus and peaceful woodlands in Brackenhurst, to the university's latest addition – a vibrant creative hub in Whitechapel, London.

The key to achieving this was the university's digital transformation. NTU aims to become one of the most digitally sophisticated universities in the UK, and this involves embedding digital into teaching and learning, research and day-to-day operations. All of which enhances the student experience.

The challenge: to lighten the admin load for staff, and make processes more student-friendly

A university as big as NTU is complex to run, and it was becoming increasingly challenging for staff to get a clear view of students and their needs, as Sharanjit Rathbone, Programme Manager, Digital Technologies explains.

"We have many different course offerings and student types – part-time and full-time, undergraduate and postgraduate, September starters and January starters – and colleagues across the university need key data on every student to meet statutory obligations and for data reporting.

"Tutors also need information about their students to help them achieve the best outcomes, for instance, whether a student has visited our support services, or if they have raised any extenuating circumstances or applied for a later submission date for an assessment.

"For a tutor who sees lots of students over the course of the year, trying to get a clear picture of each individual is a full-time job."

A need for speed and simplicity

With much of its key data held in disparate systems, administration was time-consuming for staff, as well as frustrating for students.

"Some of our business processes were still paper-based," explains Sharanjit. "We became aware that providing even the simplest data for students was becoming a big administrative overhead for colleagues. One example was council tax exemption.

"When students asked the university for a letter of evidence to apply for exemption, administrative colleagues had to search for the student on the system, pull the data across, create a letter manually and generate a PDF which they emailed to the student.

"Not only did this take up valuable time, it was not ideal from a security perspective. The process also added to the mountain of emails a student receives, and as anyone who works with young people knows, email is not always the best way to communicate with today's generation of students."

The solution: a central data point for staff and students

To make it easier for staff and students to manage the data they need, NTU worked with Ellucian to implement Ellucian Experience and to connect the relevant data from its Banner system.

Sharanjit describes how academics and some professional services colleagues at the university can now access student data with a single login to Experience. "We have applied our own role-based data security model for access to Experience, so there is a student data view as well as staff views with different levels of permissions based on their role category.

"Student-facing colleagues like academics, librarians and security can see relevant information about their students, while those in a student support services role can access more sensitive but critical information such as conversations with a student about reasonable adjustments to support their learning.

"While this information was available previously, staff had to search in Banner or scroll through multiple folders in different SharePoint sites. Now they simply go into Experience, enter the user ID for the student and all the information they need is there."

Relevant student data on tap

Experience is also helping students by giving them a quick and easy digital entry point to their data.

"Students used to ask the administration team to update their personal details, but now they can view and amend their own details from an Experience card. Students can also see what information is held on their record about things like applications for extensions and academic appeals, which helps them ensure they are meeting their course requirements."

Requesting evidence of student status, such as the letter for council tax exemption, has also become a much simpler task for students, as Sharanjit describes.

"Students simply pick a card in Experience, generate a letter and off they go."

The impact: a better experience for staff and students

Staff can instantly see the information they need to be able to support their students, check on their wellbeing and spot if anyone is at risk of difficulties with their academic progress as well as the wider aspects of student life.

"As new systems come online which can support students, whether that's in their studies or their wellbeing, we will build them into Experience. Being able to make these connections helps academic and professional services staff can give students the best possible journey to success," adds Sharanjit.

Better access to student data has also helped to streamline essential administration, and importantly, it has saved an immense amount of time for staff, freeing them up to support students in other ways.

"From July to November, students downloaded a total of 4,199 confirmation of status letters as evidence for council tax exemption, opening bank accounts and securing accommodation. We estimate that over the course of a year, Experience will have saved us around 110 days of staff time."