Teaching delivery, particularly its effectiveness and how students are engaging with it, should be evaluated regularly. While formal mechanisms for evaluating teaching at the end of a module are in place, such as through Module Evaluation Questionnaires, it is strongly recommended that opportunities are created to obtain feedback from students and evaluate the effectiveness of teaching during the running of modules. In his case study, Martin Roberts talks about his use of the reporting tools available in Blackboard to check student engagement. A recorded training session is also available on this topic.
Remember to take time to reflect on your teaching and identify aspects that worked well and those that worked less well, ideally including finding out the students’ perception of the session.
Check the ‘Pulse’ of your students
Asking students how they are finding the teaching and activities and what can be done to enhance their overall learning experience is important both to get feedback, but also as a way for students to feel more engaged in the overall teaching experience. For example, this could be done through:
- a short, anonymous survey with open questions for the students to comment on any aspect of the teaching and learning experience;
- a poll with closed questions that allow students to make decisions about specific aspects of the teaching; or,
- asking students for their thoughts and opinions while speaking to them about other matters, such as when giving them feedback on their work.
A recorded training session introduces a range of tools and approaches to both foster and measure how students are engaging with online learning activities. Additionally, the session explores how to obtain feedback from students on their learning experience.
Once you have the feedback from the students, you should look at it with an open mind and work out what might be possible and/or practical and then make a decision about where and how to make changes to reflect the suggestions from the students. If you are unable to accommodate particular suggestions, perhaps due to timetabling practicalities, professional body requirements or because the suggestions are pedagogically inappropriate, you should let the students know that you value their suggestions along with the reasons why you will not be able to implement some of them. Posting anonymised requests and your responses on Blackboard is a useful action as it increases the transparency of the module design to students, shows that you are listening to feedback to all students including those who have not provided any, helps encourage further feedback, and reduces the need to deal with repeated requests on the same topic. It can also be helpful to highlight situations where there was differing feedback, such as half a group wanting one change and the rest wanting a contradictory change, as this can help manage their expectations for amendments.
General ‘Student Voice’ input
In addition to obtaining input from students on particular modules and courses, the university has also been conducting a wide range of activities to get a general perspective on teaching and learning from students, particularly around online and flexible learning. Incorporating the findings of this research into teaching, where appropriate, is also recommended as a way to improve the overall student experience.
