For the data collection I planned to retrieve workshop booking data ranging from the beginning of the 2021 term (September 2021) to the beginning of 2023 term. That way I could compare and organise the data in the following categories:
- Bookings by course
- Bookings by month
- Total number of bookings for benches vs booking for one-to-one consultation
- Observe if there are any obvious trends worth focusing on
- Separate the booking data by year
The plan was to look at the data and separate the students into two categories: 1- Heavy users, and 2- Sporadic users. I would then send them different questionnaires trying to understand from group ‘Heavy users’ how they perceived the space, how welcome they felt and what worked / didn’t work for them. Did they use the space because they feel comfortable or in spite feeling unease or unwelcome?
A different questionnaire would be sent to students perceived as ‘sporadic users’, that meaning students that booked spaces without following up weekly or monthly, with no trends observed. I would ask questions to understand if the lack of bookings were due to lack of support, perception of openness and accessibility. It could have been project related or that their needs were being met by a one-off visit.
A separate questionnaire would be sent to the course leaders (stakeholders of the space) to understand if they are happy with the usage distribution and/or encountered any problems with student access that we weren’t aware of. In their perception the students were using the space as intended or less/more than they envisioned.
This could be used for a secondary analysis and conversation. I was expecting (based on anecdotal evidence) to observe the trends of usage increasing in the past two years, with the cohorts being similar in size but the number of heavy users increasing. That brings limitation of space, difficulties in finding available slots. Having this data at hand, could allow me to argue for more space and resources to be able to better support the students.
Challenge one:
After many back and forth e-mails and calls with IT services at CSM, I was told for definite that the only booking data I can access is from October 2022 (one year worth of data) and only in monthly instalments. I couldn’t access any data from before that time, which thrown me off my original plan. October 2022 to October 2023 doesn’t even cover a whole academic year, as I would miss data from September 2022.
Challenge two:
All the data was given as a spreadsheet with students’ names and emails and the time of booking. It was a lot of information to clean up and sometimes the student’s names don’t match what we have on the system (or we know them by). An example of data is below:
I then needed to manually assign each student to a course based on my memory from who they are and which course they are from. The one’s I could not recognise I left to one side before doing a more in-depth comparison with the enrolled student’s lists that I got given by their course leaders.
A reflection I make here is that we should have a much better system of knowing who is booking and a way of keeping this data for future use. It is such an important piece of information that seems to be just thrown away and lost forever. It took me a long time, but I finally assigned the 359 names from 2022 and 1129 names from 2023 to the courses they belong to and organised in a month by-month secondary table. Again, I can’t post an example image of this here as the data contain many personal identifiers. They will be shown in the presentation.
I moved on to divide this data into courses, months, and which bookings were for workspace vs consultation time (one-to one). After doing that, I manually counted them and started playing around ways to visualize them in a meaningful way. At this stage, I admit I was getting confused about the way forward. My initial idea of analysing trends was no longer possible or comparing one year’s cohort with another was also not a reality anymore. I let the data and my curiosity lead the way and gave myself a couple of days to just observe and ‘play around’.
Challenge 3:
How can I reframe my questions without trying to force a narrative now that my initial idea is out of the window? I didn’t want to deviate from the core idea of the project. I still wanted to focus on the ideas of inclusivity, availability and perceived openness of the space and staff support. I had a few interactions with my tutors, colleagues and PgCert peers and that helped me add the following reflections:
Look at the data I have and try to gain relevant information, what can I learn from what is available?
How do consultations (one to one time) translate into usage?
Are the students feeling empowered to navigate the workshop through ono-to-one time or through technician lead workshops? – add this to the questionnaires.
Get formal letter of approval from Line manager to use data retrospectively.
Consider replacing the students’ questionnaire for a focus group.
Make sure to unpack terms such as ‘welcome’ and ‘experience’.