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 primary themes: authorities, assist 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 experiences and interactive dashboards, offering shoppers with deeper insights.
Created throughout 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, improvement and the way universities and organisations can use it to remodel how they join with worldwide college students.
As a earlier worldwide scholar, initially from Singapore, Balakrishnan was amongst a gaggle of extremely engaged college students who contributed to federal advisory boards whereas learning in Australia. When the pandemic struck, Balakrishnan was known as upon to supply insights into the experiences of Australia’s 650,000 worldwide college students, analyzing the impression 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 perfect methods to reopen mobility, they trialled the platform, with organisations akin to Austrade and Research Australia eager to discover the way it may very well be scaled as much as promote Australia as a prime examine 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 nicely 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
By 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 examine vacation spot, and as non-traditional locations emerge, the group behind the platform say there’s a big untapped good thing about gauging what potential college students are occupied with 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.
Each 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 software has gone from solely producing static experiences to being reimagined into a knowledge dashboard, complemented by month-to-month experiences and actionable insights for the sector it seeks to serve.
Organisations and establishments can customise their use of the platform, deciding on the feelings, markets, and matters most related to their targets. This might embody benchmarking their model efficiency in opposition to rivals, with information up to date each 24 hours.
Elsewhere, a more moderen function permits customers to work together with and ballot worldwide college students, providing real-time insights into offshore and onshore scholar sentiment by way of fast response pulse checks.
In latest months, the platform has provided establishments and organisations worthwhile 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 longer term.
