This interactive session will explore cultures of student feedback, and how these are shaped by different stakeholders with different interests on campus.

From 2021 to 2023, a joint project between the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching and the Institutional Planning Department at the University of Cape Town explored practices and policies related to student feedback through course evaluations at UCT and at a number of other similar universities. The purpose for doing so was to inform requirements for a new institutional system and to provide recommendations for changes to policy and practices. 

This presentation will explore the competing interests and differing perspectives on course evaluations articulated by a range of campus stakeholders. We identified five key concerns for institutional attention: policy clarity, formative use for professional development, summative use for promotion and performance reviews, bullying and abuse, and survey fatigue leading to low response rates. 

With live input from workshop participants, we’ll conclude by looking at possible strategies to shift practices to more positive cultures of student feedback.

In this session, learn how Explorance Blue empowers institutions to continuously collect and measure student feedback across the academic lifecycle – gaining a holistic view of the student experience to develop data-driven strategies for student success.​

Explorance Solutions Engineer Chris Slack will demonstrate:​

•  Survey design​
• Survey logic and customisations​
• Engagement tools​
• Survey fill-out​
• Reporting​

Explorance Blue, the leading Feedback Analytics platform for Higher Education, offers a centralised process that is designed to seamlessly integrate within your campus infrastructure and automate all major student feedback gathering initiatives including course evaluations, institutional surveys, pulse surveys, competency assessments, alumni surveys, and much more.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The University of St.Gallen strategically leverages instructor engagement to both ensure the student voice gets heard as well as motivate students to use their voice. In this talk we will show what measures the University of St.Gallen has taken in its processes and on a technical level to raise instructor engagement and thus ensure the student voice is heard.

The Role of Feedback in Student Profiling as a Prerequisite for Successful Teaching, Learning, Academic, and General Student Support

This presentation will focus on how including the students’ voice through student feedback can drive change to create an enabling environment for student success. There are various barriers that could prevent this and Higher Education institutions must critically engage with and mitigate these barriers as far as possible. The session will focus on the potential ways to mitigate the following risks and barriers to real engagement with the students’ voice in the journey to success:

1. Only using student ratings as a metric for quality assurance and performance evaluation instead of using it as a mechanism to drive teaching-learning-assessment change (including the professional learning of academics)
2. Using a one-size-fits-all standardised approach to student feedback without a real understanding of what the ratings could imply for change and improvement or integrating it with other feedback (qualitative) mechanisms to develop a holistic view of students’ learning experiences.
3. Not “closing the loop” in terms of a lack of engagement with students based on the feedback they provide
4. Entrenching the commodification of higher education (and knowledge) by using student feedback as a transactional rather than transformative engagement.

These barriers / risks can be mitigated by imaging a more holistic system with multiple and continuous forms of feedback characterized by numerous mutually beneficial engagements. In such a system the student voice both contributes to transformation of teaching-learning-assessment and is continually transformed through reflection on students’ own learning. This transformation of both the institution’s teaching-learning-assessment practices and students’ perspectives on their own learning is crucial in the journey to success at SU.

In this session, learn how Explorance MLY can inform student experience and retention strategies by completing the student feedback picture – distilling valuable insights into student needs and expectations from open-text comments.​

​Explorance Solutions Engineer Chris Slack will demonstrate:​

• Explorance MLY Self-service Portal​
• How the solution categorizes comments into student-specific topics and sentiment analysis​
• Topic Explorer​

​Explorance MLY is an award-winning, AI platform purpose-built to understand the student experience and amplify the student voice both inside and outside the classroom. Explorance MLY leverages machine learning to provide in-depth analysis of qualitative feedback by determining topic-specific sentiment analysis, identifying feedback patterns, and highlighting recommendations expressed on what to start, continue, or stop doing.​

There will also be an opportunity to register for your FREE comment analysis report from Explorance MLY.

Coming soon