Setting students and academics free to engage: what do we need to do?

An engaged student body is key to positively influencing student learning gain, a topic currently at the centre of national and international higher education policy attention. One of the challenges to achieving excellence in this field is making the right choice of coordinated activities designed to encourage students to effectively engage in their studies. The challenge is made more difficult by the fact that activity to be categorised as ‘student engagement’ is still being clarified. This paper explores the potential for university activity around student engagement to be conceptualised as social marketing activity, and specifically, whether a design guide for social marketers is of potential value as a tool to design and evaluate interventions at any level (university, faculty, school or tutor-led) to promote student engagement.