Brown Bag Seminar with Deodat Mwesiumo

Abstract:
The higher education landscape is undergoing significant changes due to various factors, such as technological advances, shifts in student demographics, and evolving societal needs. These changes have sparked a growing interest in understanding what students value most in their educational journey. Such understanding is crucial as it can be used to enhance the quality of teaching and learning. In Norway, the Studiebarometeret is one of the tools used to provide this insight. Typically, analyses and reports on data from the Studiebarometeret are presented as descriptive statistics of individual factors, offering simple summaries of the sample and the measurements. This provides an overview of students' views on various aspects related to teaching and learning. While this overview is valuable, further analysis of data from the Studiebarometeret can yield a deeper understanding of the patterns and relationships between different variables. The present study takes a closer look into the Studiebarometeret 2023 to identify the key aspects that higher education students in Norway care about the most. The variables considered in the analysis include the study programme’s connection to working life, the amount of time a student spends on studies, the level of student commitment, satisfaction with learning outcomes, forms of assessment, organization of the study programme, academic and social learning environment, feedback and guidance, and satisfaction with teaching. Overall, the results of the Importance-Performance Analysis show that the three most important factors are [1] the organization of the study programme [2] satisfaction with teaching, and [3] the academic and social learning environment. Intriguingly, feedback and guidance, including discussions with teachers, appear to be the least important factor among students across all programmes. Attend the seminar to hear other interesting insights from the analysis.