10 July 2025 
Monica Madeley, Projects and Engagement Officer
On 24th June the Explorance MLY UK Impact Tour was held at Woburn House, headquarters of Universities UK, and a hub for a number of other influential organisations in the higher education sector. HESPA were delighted to support this event and have so many of our members attend (including Gavin Lee, formerly on the HESPA Executive Committee, as a keynote speaker).
Themed ‘Harnessing Qualitative AI Insights to Enhance Student & Staff Experiences in Higher Education’, the London gathering was attended by 40+ university leaders in strategic planning, teaching and learning, student experience, institutional research and academic quality.
Here are five key insights that speakers shared on the day:
1. ‘Shouting louder or listening harder?’
In his opening keynote exploring ‘What are our students trying to tell us?’, Gavin Lee, Director of Strategic Development and Planning at the University of the West Scotland, highlighted that in a full year UWS “asks a lot of questions”: 12 surveys (minimum) and 138 questions, and “gets a lot of answers”: 254,028 surveys completed each year; 2.9 million individual questions, and over 20,000 open comments. “Students are telling us all we need to know, but we have limited ability to hear them or act,” Gavin told delegates, before going on to outline how scale, systems, and (the wrong) questions all stop universities from listening during the process of feedback. He then presented some case-study examples and three steps to enabling action and success: Delivering insight, rapidly; Upskilling and supporting colleagues to act; and Impact through partnership: students, services, academics.
2. Going beyond the numbers, what do students have to say
Dr Camille Kandiko Howson, Professor of Higher Education in the Centre for Higher Education Research and Scholarship at Imperial College London, shared her own experiences of ‘Getting insights beyond positive/negative: Analysing NSS qualitative comments’. She majored on issues around not listening to student voice, focusing on (dis) satisfaction, and the challenges of connecting qualitative and quantitative data. Building on Gavin’s presentation, Camille emphasised the importance of feedback loops and students as partners, before closing with her top tips for engaging students:
3. Listening at scale: Leveraging AI to understand diverse student experiences
Having first piloted MLY on NSS open-text data in 2024, Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) has gone on to analyse over 13,000 module evaluation comments for specific groups in support of the University’s Access and Participation Plan 2025-29, with reference to gaps in continuation, completion and/or attainment. Dr Phil Carey, Dean of the LJMU Teaching and Learning Academy, explained how positive topics were extracted across Students with Mental Health Conditions and Students with Social or Communication Impairments, Students from Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) 1 and 2, Black Students, and Students from Northern Ireland; improvement opportunities identified, and recommendations made to better support the specific emerging needs of those student groups.
4. Accelerating insights: The power of rapid feedback
At Explorance's Student Voices in Higher Education Conference in May, Kirsty Scanlan, Director of Strategic Planning, Performance & Projects at Heriot-Watt University, shared the impact of MLY on student experiences surveys. Kirsty’s latest presentation focused on a further application: a staff Health & Wellbeing Pulse Survey. The MLY platform enabled fast and effective topic analysis of the 2,000+ comments as well as streamlined export of the analysis – including all relevant data fields – for immediate use and implementation into Power BI as a reporting mechanism. Within one week of survey closure, 45 leaders across the global institution received their reports. “By using MLY to process the free-text responses from our staff Health & Wellbeing Pulse Survey, we saved approximately eight hours of manual analysis time, a 94% reduction in processing time,” Kirsty revealed.
5. Transforming unstructured data into actionable feedback intelligence
Before a series of group roundtable discussions on issues ranging from ‘Making qualitative data actionable: what works?’ and ‘AI for listening at scale: opportunities and risks’, to 'Bridging the gap: aligning quantitative and qualitative data’ and ‘Handling comments of concern or sensitive feedback’, Explorance’s Senior Solutions Engineer Chris Slack took to the floor to give an update on MLY. “Without MLY, there are millions of comments, and no way to make sense of them,” Chris said. “Students were speaking – but no-one is really listening.” Today, in higher education alone, MLY is used by over 80 institutions. 20 million+ HE comments have been analysed, 30 million+ insights generated, 5 million+ improvements supported, and 500,000+ alerts highlighted. Mightily impressive stats.
