A rather recent research shows, a well-thought strategy towards collecting student feedback has the power to improve the effectiveness of teachers by 20-30%. And how these students get taught creates a direct impact on these students’ overall success and academic performance.
Whether it is the universities, the coaching institutes, or even colleges, you could collect student feedback regarding the quality of seminars, projects, study material, teaching strategies, and so on. Further, this data could be used in training teachers, towards improving study materials, optimizing schedules, along enhancing overall results that the educational institutes look to provide.
Let us figure out why also how we should collect our feedback:
Figure out the student expectations
Feedback is usually understood as something that is relevant after one completes a semester or a course. But after a particular course commences, students are all ready to put it aside and forget all about it. So, rather than waiting for the semester to end, it is better to understand the expectations of the students at the outset when the course commences, leveraging the feedback collection methods or pre-course surveys. Communicate to your students how you would use the feedback they provide to improve the curriculum or the learning strategies way prior to when the semester begins.
The following elements are what you can take feedback on:
- Understanding the curriculum or course syllabus
- Scheduling lecture
- What are the preferred learning styles?
- Previous knowledge of the students in the subject matter
- Teachers’ expectations
Note: Make sure you ask your students that they share their expectations in their personal ways through open-ended questions.
Improve Learning
The effectiveness of the course and the resources bring a direct impact on the performance of the performance and progress of the students. So, you need to conduct student feedback so that you could check how effective the training courses and your study materials are.
You could understand this in your first couple of months of a year or semester, also use the feedback data so that you could reasonably improve all the resources you have all the control over, like:
- Training/study material
- Lab activities
- Training that is experimental
- How frequently do the students interact with their faculty
- Workload and class structure
Faculty Performance Improvement
According to one of the reports by a popular study, students need to exhibit six factors of success – Focused, Valued, Connected, Engaged, Directed, and Nurtured. Also, the success of your faculty is given to the ability of faculty to help all students to achieve the said success factors.
You could understand the kind of effect the teachers come with and attain superlative teaching standards through conducting student feedback. Using the medium of email or SMS surveys plus other feedback programs, they will be able to directly share what could improve their learning so far, and thus, performance.
You could conduct student feedback so as to assess these really vital metrics:
- The accessibility and approachability of teachers
- Teaching and knowledge style
- At what pace teaching is done
- Communication
- The ability to answer questions
- How willing are you to solve queries?
- How willing are you to provide feedback?
- Equality and fairness
- Helpfulness
Improve upon the learning environment
The kind of learning environment we have comes with an indispensable job of playing in the academic success and learning of the learners. We can visualize a shift that has come in the pattern of learning environment that is preferred by the students. The development of the learning environment is the main trigger that helps in achieving higher education standards in several universities. You need to remember that though you could welcome plus facilitate the significant changes, it remains always a wise choice to measure the capacity and potential of the strategies you take through collecting student feedback.
You could use the data of student feedback to measure all their perspective that surrounds:
- Support that the management gives
- The action was taken on student feedback
- How flexible are the learning opportunities?
- Peer support
- Emphasis on the mental health of the students
- Equal and fairness in participation
- Opportunities of social development
- Flexibility in finances or financial viability
- Rewards and recognitions
Improve the facilities
Whenever the students provide feedback on the facilities, these could mostly go unnoticed yet could have a great impact on the level of effectiveness of your system of education. After all, the ease and comfort of the students around certain elements like:
- Transport
- Infrastructure
- Class and seat allotments
- Spaciousness
- Cafeteria
- Security
How would you collect Student Feedback?
Student feedback could be taken at several touchpoints using different methodologies. You could either use a single type of methodology or else make a combination of different ones based on your goals plus objectives. Let us understand the methods through which you could collect student feedback.
Modify all kinds of Formative Assessments
All colleges, as well as universities, utilize the strategies to formative assessment so as to assess the mid-semester or mid-project learning. You could use this kind of technique to collect feedback on your classes, teaching style of the faculty, their pace, along accessibility to experiment with the learning techniques also optimize them so that they can align the strengths of the students.
Why Use Formative Assessments?
Students are most familiar with all formative assessments. When you modify the formative assessments so that you could collect feedback from all the students, you could gather detailed feedback in regular intervals.
Use Student Feedback Software for Surveys
Student feedback surveys to conduct surveys are one of the greatest ways of understanding how satisfied students are with the course, the methods of teaching, the learning environments, also the facility. Using a good student survey tool, you could easily create certain survey tools, you could easily build surveys with the help of templates, and then share them digitally. And this is not just a simple strategy for effective feedback collection but also a highly time-effective mode of understanding the students better.
Why Feedback Surveys for Students?
- A feedback survey could be shared via any medium, that includes email, mobile, tablet, SMS, website, kiosk, weblink, mobile app, live chat, and QR code.
- Millions of students could take a survey simultaneously, which certainly is more efficient while considering ease and time.
- Survey outcomes could be viewed in the insightful reports.
- Digital surveys could be conducted maintaining anonymity, by encouraging highly honest feedback.
- The digital surveys are easier to conduct plus can be taken while on move, which could significantly better the rate of participation.
Conducting Group Discussions
You could have detailed discussions regarding the ideas and practices that could improve the learning of the students along with academic outcomes. For instance, you could discuss if the students would learn better by indulging with the groups and come up with a comprehensive plan. At the same time, you could conduct certain polls to check which kind of teaching style or which course material comes more helpful.
Why would you need group discussions?
Group discussions enable connecting with the students face-to-face. Plus, discussions could make the students feel highly comfortable for them to put their views forth.
Create one Student Feedback Portal
By creating a portal for student feedback is one great way of encouraging students to provide their feedback at any point of time they want. However, it is not one structured methodology of feedback as you may or may not get quality feedback. There are student suggestion/complaint portals that can add value to your program of acquiring feedback using student feedback apps if it is used in combination with the other more structured techniques of feedback.
What is the need for Portals for Student Feedback?
The student feedback portals remain open all time, 24X7, which is highly encouraging because students can share feedback the moment they come across some sort of a challenge.
Student Feedback Software for Survey
Surveys remain the most effective tool while you are looking towards collecting feedback at scale. The student feedback software for the survey has been designed to keep the needs of any educational institute in their mind. Let’s check how our survey tool would enable you:
- Create different kinds of surveys for the entire year with the help of customizable templates.
- Share some surveys using all the digital channels, which include tablet, mobile, SMS, mobile apps, website, kiosk, QR code, and live chat.
- Creating reports easily using our analysis and reporting tools to receive a bird-eye view of the student feedback data.
- Set up certain reminders and alerts for different kinds of stakeholders.
- Receive all responses in real-time.
- Apply all survey logic so that your surveys come of high relevance.
Student feedbacks could help you in changing the entire dynamics within your education system in one of the most wonderful ways. All that you require is the right kind of strategy for feedback collection along with the resources so that you could act on this feedbacks rather fast.
