Our Experience with Online Student Feedback

Adel AbunawassWill Lloyd

Edwin Rudolph

Department of Computer ScienceState University of West Georgia{adel,wlloyd,erudolph}@westga.edu

http://adel.cs.westga.edu/acmmidsoutheast04/

Motivation

• Know thoughts/input of stakeholders• Collect/store data with minimum cost• Quick reaction time to critical issues• Documentation for assessment• Documentation for specific program needs

• Curiosity!

Instruments• Surveys:

– Undergraduate– Graduate– Capstone– Exit Interview– Alumni– Employers

• Students Evaluation of Instructions– SEI

• Additional Surveys as requested/needed – CS 1 / 2

• Interactive Blog– CS Blog

Systems

• Free and open-source software• phpESP: PHP Easy Survey Package

– Easy to use web UI for survey creation, management, and reporting

– Data can be exported (i.e., Excel) or queried (MySQL)

• bBlog– Simple blog system written in PHP using MySQL

• Integrated with:– Moodle: A Free, Open-Source Course Management

System for Online Learning– COMPASS: Our CS Assessment Project

Our Experience

• We gather feedback via:– Various Surveys– Course Assessment– Blog

• We formulate discussion points for blogging• Faculty review and make recommendations• Department takes appropriate actions

• Overall, it has been very positive, helpful, valuable, and less intrusive…

Conclusions

• Be wise, easy tools are seductive• Too much information is not always good• Keep your questionnaires/requests clear, short, &

focused• Keep your eyes on the prize- deal with important &

critical issues first• Useful documentation for programmatic needs• Must supplement formal assessment methods

• Just because you know something is broken, that does not mean you know how to fix it- take time to think through the issue & develop an appropriate solution…

References

• phpESP: PHP Easy Survey Package– http://phpesp.sourceforge.net/

• bBlog– http://www.bblog.com/

• COMPASS: Computer Science Assessment– http://compass.cs.westga.edu

• Moodle: A Free, Open-Source Course Management System for Online Learning– http://moodle.org/