We are delighted to have the first users of the live Notifications Service on board. The Student Surveys team are now delivering personalised, call-to-action notifications to students through MyEd.

Existing process

The Student Surveys Unit had been sending out emails to students with links to complete various surveys and also publishing these through the Student Surveys MyEd channel. These included course enhancement questionnaires (CEQs), national student surveys (NSS) and postgraduate experience surveys (PTES and PRES).

The initial email invitation is sent centrally from the survey management system, EvaSys. Survey data is also downloaded to a CSV file, enriched and then processed by a PowerShell script to generate and send reminder emails with a link to complete a survey.

The existing process also used Google Fusion tables, populated by importing an extract from EvaSys, as a data source for the MyEd Student Survey channel. This had been identified as not compliant with the GDPR, and the Notifications Service was suggested as an alternative.

What we did

We changed an existing PowerShell script to read from updated CSV files that contain the UUNs of the respondents, the course and survey title, survey link, notification end date and action to perform (insert, update or delete).

The script forms the body of an email in the required specific format and sends the email to the Notifications system inbox. This message is then processed by the Notifications system, to generate a notification for the respondent in MyEd with a link to complete the survey. The same script can be used to update or delete the notifications as required.

Success

Following a period of testing the different scenarios and refining the processes, the survey notifications went live during the first week of March and the process is now GDPR compliant. To date, over 80,000 survey notifications have been successfully sent out, with a peak delivery of 39,395 in one batch.

Future changes

We soon hope to update the scripts to utilise the Notifications API, providing a more robust and efficient solution than email. Going forward, we will work with the Student Surveys team to investigate possible ways to automate the process further and potentially integrate with the survey systems.

Find out more

Notifications Service Wiki

Please contact the service team if you have any questions or would like to find out more : notifications.service@ed.ac.uk