If a tree falls and no one’s around to hand it a feedback survey, does it make a sound?
Here in MEE (Multidisciplinary Engineering Education), we pride ourselves on giving students engaging and valuable learning experiences during practical lab classes. But if we don’t adequately listen to student viewpoints then how can we be so sure their experiences are good ones?
Yes, we do have major centralised student questionnaires, but these provide only sparse information every 6 months/year. Plenty of holes still remain within our feedback net, which means lots of valuable information is not being caught by our existing systems.
MEE is therefore launching its inaugural Feedback Strategy!
This strategy puts a coherent structure to how we deal with student feedback, and identify areas to make improvements to how MEE operates. MEE aspires to be leaders for student experience, so let’s keep going!
Most of our feedback currently comes in waves coinciding with the 6 month/annual student surveys. I struggle to remember the labs I taught 3 days ago, so I imagine that all the juicy details of a student's experience from the past year are hard for them to recall at survey time. In addition, these surveys offer only small windows of opportunity for students to voice their opinions to us, so...
Soon, every lab subfolder in our virtual learning environment will contain a link/QR code connecting students directly to the new portal called the “Feedback Letterbox”.
This is only the beginning….
In this blog I wanted to explain what the feedback strategy is for and generally what it will look like. So how/when will it be implemented and how will it affect MEE staff?
The first stage of rolling out the strategy is to cover just the labs within the ACME theme (Aerospace, Civil & Mechanical Engineering). This means that soon the lab academic-leads will be asked to do 2 things:
1) Put the Feedback Letterbox portal (link/QR code) onto every folder of our virtual learning environment, for their Spring semester labs.
2) Engage with feedback actioning when it comes up!
Coming up:
Blog Episode 2 – Did it work? 1 year of reflections and impact
Here in MEE (Multidisciplinary Engineering Education), we pride ourselves on giving students engaging and valuable learning experiences during practical lab classes. But if we don’t adequately listen to student viewpoints then how can we be so sure their experiences are good ones?
Yes, we do have major centralised student questionnaires, but these provide only sparse information every 6 months/year. Plenty of holes still remain within our feedback net, which means lots of valuable information is not being caught by our existing systems.
MEE is therefore launching its inaugural Feedback Strategy!
This strategy puts a coherent structure to how we deal with student feedback, and identify areas to make improvements to how MEE operates. MEE aspires to be leaders for student experience, so let’s keep going!
The feedback strategy not only means refining our net for catching different types of feedback, but it will also help organise the way we deal with the various streams of incoming feedback data. This will make us much more effective at implementing good ideas arising from feedback, and also to nurture a positive feedback-culture which students feel a part of.
…….so what does it look like?
…….so what does it look like?
- A new MEE-wide feedback portal (via our virtual learning environment)
- Collection of all feedback data to a central hub
- A feedback actioning plan
- A large internal instructions document (to outline how it all works)
- Other future projects or research that investigate student experience
Most of our feedback currently comes in waves coinciding with the 6 month/annual student surveys. I struggle to remember the labs I taught 3 days ago, so I imagine that all the juicy details of a student's experience from the past year are hard for them to recall at survey time. In addition, these surveys offer only small windows of opportunity for students to voice their opinions to us, so...
... the idea now is to create an open-door policy for feedback.
Soon, every lab subfolder in our virtual learning environment will contain a link/QR code connecting students directly to the new portal called the “Feedback Letterbox”.
The Feedback Letterbox is a page on MEEs website which has a super-simple and non-scary text box for students to provide feedback in whatever form they choose, on any matter relating to labs.
The Feedback Letterbox is:
So, we will use this new portal alongside all the existing avenues for gathering feedback. This should give us a more complete picture of student views and experiences.
Process it.
All raw feedback data will be collected into a central hub, anonymised, and stored appropriately. The data will be then classified into some key topics, and qualitatively analysed so that a set of possible actions can be formulated.
A feedback coordinator will then communicate with the MEE theme leads, agreeing on courses of action which will then be flowed down to all the staff by the theme leads.
Act on it.
After theme leads have communicated any changes that their team should make, it will be each individual's responsibility to either implement the required actions, or to push-back and challenge it.
Since mandating actions to staff without consultation is ‘not-cool’, staff are encouraged to raise concerns or issues about any action, so that it can be discussed in further detail. Most of the time if something is clearly the right thing to do, then implementing change should be friction-free.
For larger strategic changes that may come to light, discussions will be held across the themes to agree on actions. Then, with all the labs in all the themes acting concurrently, we can make wide reaching impacts across the department.
Close the loop.
Finally, how can we show the students (and other stakeholders) that we are doing all this work to make their experience better?
Well there are many possible ways, but here are few which come to mind (I’m sure there are more):
Research
In addition to what was mentioned in “Close the loop”, we also have plans to evaluate the work done and produce research publications on the most interesting topics that arise. These could relate to critiquing the impact of the Feedback Strategy approach in general, or focus on a specific change occurring due to some exciting and unforeseen feedback that is received. Ethical approval will be obtained for this research.
What happens next?- Permanently open
- Anonymous
- Easy & Quick
- Linked to the QR code
The QR codes could also be placed at various locations around the building, and attached to our Smiley-Face displays (described here). This means that hopefully students will complete a lab, scan the QR code, and then leave a message explaining what was awful or awesome about the lab they just did. With some encouragement, students will start using it. And if we can show that we are acting on what they tell us, I believe they will keep using it too.
So, we will use this new portal alongside all the existing avenues for gathering feedback. This should give us a more complete picture of student views and experiences.
Process it.
All raw feedback data will be collected into a central hub, anonymised, and stored appropriately. The data will be then classified into some key topics, and qualitatively analysed so that a set of possible actions can be formulated.
A feedback coordinator will then communicate with the MEE theme leads, agreeing on courses of action which will then be flowed down to all the staff by the theme leads.
Act on it.
After theme leads have communicated any changes that their team should make, it will be each individual's responsibility to either implement the required actions, or to push-back and challenge it.
Since mandating actions to staff without consultation is ‘not-cool’, staff are encouraged to raise concerns or issues about any action, so that it can be discussed in further detail. Most of the time if something is clearly the right thing to do, then implementing change should be friction-free.
For larger strategic changes that may come to light, discussions will be held across the themes to agree on actions. Then, with all the labs in all the themes acting concurrently, we can make wide reaching impacts across the department.
Close the loop.
Finally, how can we show the students (and other stakeholders) that we are doing all this work to make their experience better?
Well there are many possible ways, but here are few which come to mind (I’m sure there are more):
- Adding “You said, we did” bulletins to the display screens around MEE's Diamond building
- Adding a new page to the student facing MEE website showing our approach
- Exhibiting case studies in student newsletters
- Presenting what we have done during staff/student committee meetings
- Verbally announcing a change to students, during the lab classes themselves
Research
In addition to what was mentioned in “Close the loop”, we also have plans to evaluate the work done and produce research publications on the most interesting topics that arise. These could relate to critiquing the impact of the Feedback Strategy approach in general, or focus on a specific change occurring due to some exciting and unforeseen feedback that is received. Ethical approval will be obtained for this research.
This is only the beginning….
In this blog I wanted to explain what the feedback strategy is for and generally what it will look like. So how/when will it be implemented and how will it affect MEE staff?
The first stage of rolling out the strategy is to cover just the labs within the ACME theme (Aerospace, Civil & Mechanical Engineering). This means that soon the lab academic-leads will be asked to do 2 things:
1) Put the Feedback Letterbox portal (link/QR code) onto every folder of our virtual learning environment, for their Spring semester labs.
2) Engage with feedback actioning when it comes up!
....updates will be blogged out soon!
Coming up:
Blog Episode 2 – Did it work? 1 year of reflections and impact