Gathering student feedback

You will have put a lot of time and energy into putting your course online, but how will you know which activities and resources your students have found useful, informative and, importantly, contributed to their understanding of the course content. As well as looking at the exam or final project grades and the Moodle course logs, you can also gather feedback from your students. This will help you to improve your course in the future.

To help you with gathering useful feedback, Moodle has a set of built-in surveys. Future versions of Moodle may offer the option to build your own surveys (in fact, there are several optional modules you can download and install for exactly this purpose), but for now we'll just consider those which come with a default installation of Moodle.

There are 5 different surveys you can choose from, all of which have been chosen as being particularly useful in evaluating online course.

• ATTLS (Attitudes to Thinking and Learning Survey)
• Critical thinking
• COLLES (Constructivist On-Line Learning Environment Survey) - Actual
• COLLES - Actual and Preferred
• COLLES - Preferred

To add any of these surveys to your course, perhaps a good place would be in your course summary or conclusion section, you just need to select 'survey' from the 'add an activity' drop down list.

You are able to view all the responses by clicking on the 'View X survey responses' link in the top right. This also gives you the option to download the survey data.

If you'd prefer to create your own survey for your course, then you can either use one of the optional Moodle modules (such as the questionnaire module) or use an external surveying tool (such as Survey Monkey).

Which method you use for gathering feedback form your students, it's important the you ask the right questions and are prepared to take on board any suggestions and feedback.

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Try creating a survey in your course, look at the questions in each of the different survey types. Which do you think will be most useful to gather feedback about your course?

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