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Research tells us that for higher education to be sustainable, our courses must be of high standards for which we have systems and policies and processes in place to continuously review and improve upon. Universities collect a lot of data about students and their experiences, but few universities at this stage are able to bring this data together in an automated and scalable way, which is why we often rely on student feedback, because these student feedback surveys are at a scalable and automated way. So this ends up being a key input for course review.
And what we’re seeing, which is really exciting, is these two emerging camps about student feedback. One is that it’s not very helpful. Students don’t know what they’re talking about. Should we really be using it? In these examples, the research often leads on comments from students that are particularly nasty or unhelpful. And the second camp are universities that have done in-depth student voice projects and they understand their student experience through using healthy feedback loops about what students are experiencing in a course, how they can communicate that to their teachers, and how teachers can use this information to make changes. So, when we look at these two camps, you’ll have to think about which one your university is and which ones you may have even experienced in other roles because this is going to be one of the key inputs that we use in the next section.
The quality of your course experience for your students is assumed to be of high standard when:
- Your course content and approaches to teaching and learning are well-designed;
- Students are provided with an equitable academic experience;
- Students’ achievements can be reliably assessed (Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, 2022).
Most importantly, these descriptions of quality are reviewed in an ongoing and reflective way that is supported by evidence (or data indicators) and action plans which are monitored for impact (Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, 2021).
The quality of a course experience is often gauged through the data your university generates from your students’ responses to course experience surveys. This is typically the case because the data generated from these surveys is easily accessible and scalable across the higher education sector. While the student’s voice is an important indicator of your course experience, these tools have recently been the focus of a growing body of literature that critiques their use for being gender and race bias (Heffernan, 2022) and uncouth (Lakeman et al, 2022). Nonetheless the questions in these surveys are designed to elicit feedback about your students’ experiences of your course content and your approaches to teaching and learning (O’Leary, 2017; Richardson, 2005). And, when an institution has positive feedback loops in place for collecting and using the student voice, the feedback from student surveys can be useful (O’Leary et. Al, 2021). So, while the tool is imperfect it is an acceptable starting point for the purpose of reviewing and improving your course particularly when you triangulate it with additional data to make informed decisions about your teaching (see for example Gilmore, 2021) – this will be modelled in the next lesson ‘What can educators do?’.
Discussions
How does your institution use data generated by student feedback to make decisions regarding the course experience of your students?
Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.