Closing the Feedback Loop on Student Surveys: Development of a New Software System for Module & Programme Surveys ▶

Speakers

Ian Nickson - Explorance
Nicole O'Neill - TU Dublin

Slides


This presentation will outline the approach being developed by TU Dublin to enhance the student voice in our quality enhancement and academic decision making processes.  It will explain how the University has developed its new Quality Framework to provide a range of opportunities for the students to participate and collaborate in curriculum development, quality enhancement, academic governance structures and policy development..  This paper will outline how the University is embracing the National Steps to Partnership Framework and is working in partnership with its Students’ Union: TUDSU to develop training and support for students to actively engage in quality enhancement activities.

The presentation outline how the University has engaged with all stakeholders to develop an online survey system and will show how the implementation of a University electronic programme survey using the Blue software provided the University with rich data in respect to students’ different experiences across programmes in the Academic Year 2020-21 and how it was evident within the survey results that there was a strong diversity within the student voice in respect to their preferences for learning.  Building on this successful implementation, the presentation will outline how the University wishes to delve deeper into the diversity of the student voice and provide students with an easier way of providing their opinions across modules and programmes.  The University has heard from students that they are often not aware as to how their feedback is being acted upon and would have a stronger impetus to complete surveys if they had greater visibility of how their feedback is being acted upon.  By utilising the functionality of the Blue software, the new system will be able to provide students who have completed the survey with a summary of the responses received and the lecturers’ responses to the feedback.

The presentation will outline how the pilot implementation of the new system in January 2022 was developed, explaining the multi-layered approach to the survey design. The student and staff viewpoints, the survey is a smooth integrated survey, allowing them to easily receive the results of the survey.  From a survey design perspective, the survey is a system of layered surveys that flow from each other.  The presentation will show the survey layers, which start with a survey to lectures to populate the questions to be included in the student surveys.  The completion of the programme survey leads to a number of embedded module surveys and then once the survey to students closes, the system generates a report and survey back to lecturing staff to respond to the feedback received in the student survey.  From engaging in a pilot implementation the University will learn more about the approach and how effective it is, so that we can address any concerns being raised by stakeholders and improve the system for a fuller roller out later in the year.