Accessing the student voice : Australia's CEQuery project

This chapter reports on a national project developed in Australia in the early 2000s, funded by the Australian Government and undertaken in conjunction with Graduate Careers Australia and 14 Australian universities. The CEQuery qualitative analysis tool was developed in the partnership to mine, cluster and analyse some 285,000 best aspect and needs improvement comments made by 95,000 recent graduates in the national Course Experience Questionnaire, and to systematically use the results to improve the total student experience of universities. In subsequent years, this tool and its results have been applied in a wide variety of ways to enhance courses (development and review, retention, assessment, engagement in productive learning) and the total student experience in higher education institutions. The chapter summarises the key lessons learnt, the practical ways for using qualitative analyses to enhance the engagement and retention of students in productive learning, and identifies the need to both return to and build on the national approach adopted in the CEQuery initiative. Implications for local, national and international benchmarking using such a tool to validate the items in quantitative student feedback surveys and to identify proven ways to address improvement priorities are also discussed.