Abstract:

In modern educational settings, students are more than just receivers of knowledge. They are active participants in a learning process and an important group of stakeholders for higher educational institutions. Therefore (especially large) universities are looking for ways to hear, contextualize/evaluate and visualize the voice of students for different groups of stakeholders (e.g. lecturers, university management, curriculum developers, human resource managers…).

An environment that helps to make the students voice visible would - especially in large higher educational institutions - face a broad range of requirements, which are in an area of conflict between cost efficiency and effectiveness.

Program and Quality Management of WU Vienna, one of the largest business universities in Europe with more than 20.000 students, conducts a student panel where six different questionnaires, which were distributed in different stages of the “student lifecycle” of Master and Bachelor students help to listen to the students’ voice. These questionnaires can, with the help of an anonymous student code, be linked together to answer questions that demands longitudinal observations.

A reporting environment, which is based on two pillars helps to visualize and contextualize the voice of the students. These two pillars are annual reports of every survey (5-6 per year) and customized special reports that standardized distribute relevant outcome to different relevant groups of stakeholders.

Therefore a reporting environment is highly in demand, that supports statistical processing and visualizing of the survey based data and additionally can flexibly generate automated reports. For this reason R and LaTeX (both open source) are used for report generation.

R as a language for statistical computing and graphics is used to process the data and to produce the outcome (i.e. graphs, tables or statistical summaries) within a dynamically generated LaTeX file. LaTeX as a high-quality typesetting standard is designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation and is widely used within a broad range of scientific fields, for generating scientific papers or scientific presentation. With the help of knitR and Sweave technology these two open source software solutions can jointly be used for highly flexible reporting.

This condensed form of the student voice supports various relevant stakeholders by helping them to get a varied picture of large and diverse student cohorts. The paper will explain the technical and the managerial implementation of the WU student panel project.

Keywords:

Evaluation, student panel, students' voice.