Gather Feedback

Your teaching determines whether your students make satisfactory progress as learners. You should plan to gather their feedback regularly to find out whether your teaching is working for them, how they are responding to it, and any observations they might have. In the linked article, there's an overview of methods for collecting feedback as well as an activity to help you critique and reflect on your own teaching.

If you would like to gather feedback on your teaching, it's important you carefully consider the ways of doing this. You should also consider your questions in advance and prepare your students for this. By clicking on the link, you'll find examples of possible questions to include.

Gathering feedback during remote teaching and learning: questions and tools to use

As teaching online is one of the most important topics in today’s university organization, it’s a good idea for instructors to gather information from students about how they’re experiencing the shift. You may be doing that informally with your students by checking in via virtual office hours, email, and during any synchronous class meetings you have, but it may also be helpful to gather information in a more formal way.

Asking a few questions using Brightspace’s survey tool gives your students a chance to provide you information anonymously. To set up a survey, choose the “Survey” option under the Activities & Assessments tab in your course and then choose New Survey. We recommend you make results anonymous so that your students can let you know about problems they are experiencing without embarrassment or worry. Then choose Add/Edit Questions and input your questions. Full instructions about how to set up the survey and make it available to your students are found here.

The big question, of course, is what questions to ask the students. We recommend the following:

1. What aspects of the course or instruction are helping you learn now that we have shifted to the remote instruction phase of the Spring 2020 semester?
2. What challenges, if any, are you facing while engaging in remote learning in this course? Are there changes in teaching approaches that could help address these challenges?
3. What strategies are most effective at helping you stay engaged with your peers and the instructor during remote learning?
4. Any other comments?

These questions are designed to help students think about what is working, to let you know where they face challenges, and to leverage their knowledge of their situations to help identify solutions (or, in some cases, perhaps acknowledge that there is no great solution right now). The answers should help you identify which strategies and approaches you can lean on and which you should adjust in these final weeks of the semester.

While this move to remote teaching and learning has been and continues to be a huge challenge at times, staying connected with and responsive to your students can help both of you make the most of this hard—but very instructive—situation.

REFERENCES + LICENSE: The work "Gathering feedback during remote teaching and learning: questions and tools to use" by Cynthia Brame, Vanderbilt University, via https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/2020/04/gathering-feedback-during-remote-teaching-and-learning-questions-and-tools-to-use/, is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0, rephrased and shortened by SEA-EU.

You can survey your students in a variety of ways. In preparation, you should focus on both the means (e.g., whether a questionnaire or discussion) and the timing of the feedback collection. The University of Denver gives an insight into the options available in the following article.

It is important to seek the opinions of your learners and to do so in the right way. In the process of gathering their opinions, you should follow certain fundamental principles. The article below outlines these.

When you decide to survey your students, it's a good idea to put together a plan and work step by step. Click on the link for an example of a model.