Day 16: Responding to Student Feedback

By now in your online course, you should be starting to receive feedback from students – both informally as they share in the discussion forums and as they interact with you, and formally through your online survey (if you set it up).

How to View Survey Results in Moodle

If you set up a survey for your course (or we set one up for you) to collect early student feedback, here is how to review the results:

  • Click on the name of the survey in Moodle
  • If your survey has responses, it will have a tab for the responses as shown. Click All responses to view.
    2013-01viewresponses

Review the responses from students. How are they doing? Are there any areas of concern? What can you do to adjust? Let’s consider some common potential challenges:

Organization of Course Materials

If students are having a hard time finding materials or understanding what to do in the course, you may need to:

Instructor with Students in Computer Lab
Image by Microsoft

Instructor Presence

If students don’t feel they are receiving enough feedback and don’t feel that you are “present”, you may need to add additional strategies for establishing your faculty presence:

Learning Community

If students don’t yet feel connected to each other, you may need to work on your learning community.

  • If the course is larger than 12-15 students, you may need to split the students into groups for the discussion forum.
  • Review what opportunities the students have so far to communicate with each other – on content or not. What else could you add to facilitate? (a water cooler forum, an online chapel, etc.)
  • Offer a live session if you haven’t already.

Comments

Review the comments from students. Are there any issues that should be addressed with the whole class? Include your comments in the News Forum or in your Weekly Email.

Your Turn:

Reflect. How do you adjust to student feedback in a face-to-face course? How do you decide what is a valid complaint that needs addressing and what is just a complaint? What ways can you help distance students feel less “distant” as you respond to their feedback?

This post is Day 16 of the 20 Day Challenge to Teaching Interactive Online Courses.

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