The Scholar Supply is the AI-powered scholar insights analytic platform, pushed by real worldwide scholar voices and conversations.
The platform presently works by monitoring scholar sentiment throughout platforms and organising them into predominant themes: authorities, help companies, schooling outcomes, high quality of schooling, neighborhood and social integration, dwelling and logistics and competitor locations.
The platform’s know-how faucets into the areas of social media the place college students collect to debate the problems that matter to them, serving to to pinpoint challenges, alternatives, and areas the place insurance policies and companies can enhance – all backed by information. It then delivers tailor-made reviews and interactive dashboards, offering shoppers with deeper insights.
Created in the course of the pandemic, and based by the Lygon Group, it was introduced in March 2024 that the insights platform had been acquired by employment market platform Voyage, with key workers from the Lygon Group becoming a member of the edtech disruptor.
The PIE caught up with pioneer of the platform, Varsha Devi Balakrishnan, head of scholar insights and technique at Voyage, to debate the platform’s inception, growth and the way universities and organisations can use it to rework how they join with worldwide college students.
As a earlier worldwide scholar, initially from Singapore, Balakrishnan was amongst a bunch of extremely engaged college students who contributed to federal advisory boards whereas finding out in Australia. When the pandemic struck, Balakrishnan was referred to as upon to supply insights into the experiences of Australia’s 650,000 worldwide college students, inspecting the influence of Covid-19 and its mobility restrictions.
“We didn’t actually have a lead indicator to inform us what’s on the entrance of minds of scholars,” Balakrishnan recalled. “That was actually the place the Social Supply took place conceptually.”
As authorities our bodies explored the very best methods to reopen mobility, they trialled the platform, with organisations comparable to Austrade and Examine Australia eager to discover the way it could possibly be scaled as much as promote Australia as a prime research vacation spot.
“The Social Supply took on a lifetime of its personal the place everybody was ,” mentioned Balakrishnan.
“The subset of the conversations that we monitor as effectively has simply grown exponentially,” defined Balakrishnan. “We have now over 100,000 search phrases that we arrange and each week, we’re including to that. Simply because the sector talks, college students discuss.”
Simply because the sector talks, college students discuss
Varsha Devi Balakrishnan, The Social Supply
Via the AI-powered monitoring, and supported by the sector experience that Voyage brings, the worth for shoppers lies in discovering how such sentiments are impacting enrolments, recruitment and retention.
It’s a mannequin that’s relevant to any research vacation spot, and as non-traditional locations emerge, the workforce behind the platform say there’s a large untapped advantage of gauging what potential college students are desirous about these markets.
“The Social Supply places the scholar voice on the forefront. It permits them to be lead indicators and that’s revolutionising how we reply to college students and the way we reply to college students and the way we work together with them,” mentioned Balakrishnan.
Every day, customers can entry this information, permitting them to “pivot as college students are pivoting”, she added.
Since becoming a member of Voyage in 2024, the instrument has gone from solely producing static reviews to being reimagined into an information dashboard, complemented by month-to-month reviews and actionable insights for the sector it seeks to serve.
Organisations and establishments can customise their use of the platform, deciding on the emotions, markets, and matters most related to their targets. This might embrace benchmarking their model efficiency towards opponents, with information up to date each 24 hours.
Elsewhere, a more moderen characteristic permits customers to work together with and ballot worldwide college students, providing real-time insights into offshore and onshore scholar sentiment by means of fast response pulse checks.
In current months, the platform has provided establishments and organisations useful insights into main coverage shifts – from Donald Trump’s inauguration to Australia’s newest visa-processing directive MD111 – serving to them keep linked to worldwide scholar views and plan extra successfully for the long run.
