Last week was Speak Week! Speak Week is SRUCSA’s biggest student feedback gathering activity that happens every year. We ask every SRUC student just two questions – “what do you love about SRUC?”, and “if you were in charge, what would you change?” – and allow them to answer in whatever way they feel is right.

This year we asked these questions both as an online survey and on campus with postcards. We got support in collecting these from staff and students who helped us promote the survey in their classes. Thanks to everyone, we received 75 responses to our online survey. This doesn’t include the responses on our postcards which we will be collecting from campuses soon – so that number will be going up!

The number of responses doesn’t necessarily equal the number of students taking part. For example, if you said “I love being outdoors and the teaching is perfect” we separate that into two separate comments, one on being outdoors and one on good teaching. If we see anything we think needs immediate action, we will take it to the right person without delay.

What we will do next

We then read all your comments again and start to give each one a theme – e.g., learning online, campus facilities etc. – it varies depending on the feedback you gave us. The themes with the most comments, we expect, are the most representative of the current thoughts of SRUC students. This gives us a feel for what are the most important issues to you. Some comments may be specific to a course or even a class, so where it is possible for us to tell the course team directly, we do.

This will leave us with a sorted and themed dataset and a strong understanding of what needs to be done. We then write a report to help others understand what we now know and suggest some recommendations of what to do as a result of your feedback. We’ll share this report with you and SRUC management. Not only that, but we ask SRUC to give a response to your comments – we’ll share that response with you too.
Thank you again to everyone who took part and supported Speak Week this year! We genuinely couldn’t do it without you.