Recommendations

Gathering feedback during the teaching period is a great way to make sure you are addressing issues during the semester and being responsive to your students’ needs. Use the Feed Forward flux poll or create your own feedback tool to understand more about your students’ learning experiences.

This means informing your students of the purpose of any feedback and evaluation activities you undertake in your unit so they understand their value. It also includes talking to your students about the changes you have made based on their feedback (or the feedback of a previous cohort). You can communicate this verbally (in class time), and in writing (on the Moodle site or in the unit handbook). Making it apparent that you welcome and appreciate constructive feedback, and providing examples of actionable comments can help students to understand how to use their SETU responses most effectively. Giving them a few minutes to give feedback during a workshop can also improve completion rates so that your data is more representative.

SETU feedback can provide valuable insights into the strengths and areas for improvement in a unit. By reviewing your feedback objectively and looking for any patterns or themes that come up in comments, you can be more responsive to your students in the following semester. However, the data is most valuable when it informs future actions. Often, by the time it comes to deliver a unit again, the previous feedback has been put aside or dismissed. When you review SETU data, make an action plan for the next iteration and either make the changes while it’s front of mind. Alternatively, put the plan in the same place as the materials for next time, so that you will see and act on them in preparation for the upcoming teaching period.

It can always feel like a big step to making significant changes to your unit, or the way you approach things. When you implement changes for a unit based on SETU, you can firstly inform students of the changes you have made and why (in response to student feedback), but then you can schedule key feedback collection points during the teaching period that specifically gather student sentiments and experiences related to the new approach. If they are positive, you know that this has been successful. If they are mixed, or negative, you can unpack the feedback with students to find out what went wrong and how to improve it. Students are less likely to provide poor feedback in SETU if they have engaged in productive and meaningful conversations about adjusting to feedback during the teaching period.

There are a lot of different tools you can use to get feedback. Polls, including the FeedForward Bento box, Google Forms, and Moodle Feedback are just some of the tools you can use. Find out more about these tools in the ‘How To’ section.