in course completion rates between 2017-2019
Interested in exploring Ziplet for your institution?
SuniTAFE is a leading regional provider of vocational education and training in northwest Victoria, Australia. With several campuses across a considerable distance, SuniTAFE sought a way to gather standardised, consistent feedback from their students.
This feedback would allow them to improve their teaching and learning programs to provide a more consistent and high quality education experience across the campuses and faculties.
The primary challenge for SuniTAFE was how to maintain its high standards of quality training across all its campuses while being responsive to the diverse needs of its students. Manager of Curriculum and Data, Glenn Thompson, said “We needed to know what we didn’t know."
SuniTAFE looked to implement a student feedback system that could be quickly deployed to all teachers and students. Students receiving better teaching support in a timely manner are ultimately more engaged, and have a greater likelihood of achieving their goals.
In 2017, SuniTAFE rolled out Ziplet to each of its regional campuses after a successful pilot program. Teachers started receiving their first student responses within 24 hours of deploying Ziplet. SuniTAFE and Ziplet developed model questions for teachers to gather quality feedback on areas of student success factors, comprehension of assessment requirements, content understanding, and an appreciation of individual learning preferences.
Each teacher asks these model questions in each unit. This provides a consistent approach for teachers to gather feedback from their students and provides teachers with a valuable data set in critical areas of class delivery.
As is the nature of regional education providers, some students complete their course on-site (possibly over multiple campuses) while others are fully off-site, learning through online channels, or via a blended model. Through Ziplet, SuniTAFE accesses an aggregated, anonymised data set with answers generated by these model questions. While protecting the privacy of individual teachers, this data set provides SuniTAFE with campus- and industry-wide trends and tools for analysis.
“Sunraysia TAFE considers our student experience as our number one priority... It’s by no accident or coincidence that that our student journey experience has improved as a result of our relationship with Ziplet.”
Each teacher can use Ziplet to ask additional questions of their students. These questions might relate to specific course content, a work placement, or individual learning preferences. The ease of Ziplet means that a teacher can ask these questions quickly from a single platform to gather regular feedback from their students.
Since implementation, SuniTAFE has gathered over 16,000 student feedback data points, and grown more than 100% year-on-year since 2017. This valuable data ensures SuniTAFE maintains its high-quality training standards at an institutional level.
“Ziplet has provided a safe, interactive and an easy way for students to contribute towards their preferred way to learn, as well as enabling our teachers to make real time adjustments to their delivery, meaning students are benefiting from their own feedback in real time. We are able to identify students that are at risk of disengagement, again in real time, and introduce the necessary support networks that has resulted in a significant increase in our completion levels that also shows as improvement against our student satisfaction results.”
By empowering teachers with effective student feedback, and by making data-driven decisions, SuniTAFE continues to advance their reputation as one of Australia's best regional TAFE providers.