Attending to Learner Needs

Description

Ask students for their opinions, their learning needs and ideas and discuss results at a time that can still lead to changes. For example, you can also ask them to choose a topic (from a list), how they want to use the course for learning, what their expectations are or how and why they want to use the online material, so you can adjust your course to their needs.

Further, initiating a dialog about the learning process of students shows that you have a true interest in how well students learn in your course. Adopt a “culture of meta comments” by regularly discussing the reasoning behind your assignment design, expectations or teaching set-up and respond to student voices and wishes.

Note
Use cases

  • To activate students.
  • When you feel that the course participants are stuck.
  • To check in with your students and make their voice heard.
  • When you don't understand why people don't show up to live classes.

  • Stud.IP survey tool in the workspace: create questionnaires to get feedback from your students (course > administration > Questionnaire).
  • Stud.IP evaluation tool (course > administration > evaluations).
  • BBB Polls: Get instant feedback during your lectures (anonymous or non-anonymous).
  • Stud.IP Forum: Make a post and ask students to comment on it.
  • Element: Post your question in the course chat room.
  • BBB Poll using Smart Slides: The tool can generate polls from your slides with numbers or yes/ no answers (only if you have uploaded slides, not anonymous).

MINI: You can use these tips quickly and with little effort in your current teaching.

~ 10-15 Minutes per feedback question

  1. Ask your students one or two questions at a time about their opinion or learning needs (in the Chat/ Feedback survey/live) and explain how you plan to act on their answers.
  2. When asking for feedback from students, communicate how it helps you teaching the course.
  3. Send out a course email with a link to the feedback survey.
  4. Discuss the results in the next session/ in the chat/ forum.

  • Make sure that the answers to a survey can be submitted anonymously.
  • Polls can appear as some kind of a referendum, but you can point out that you will use this as a basis for the next step/ your decision regarding xy.
  • Depending on the issue, you can iterate feedback and / or point out how the course is going for you. What do you need? What works for you?