Student Course Surveys

2023 Semester 2 Survey Response Rate Dashboard

This dashboard can be used to track response rates at school, programme and course level. It will be updated at 10am each day.
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Why we do it

Student course surveys are a key requirement for self-evaluation and an enabler for us to improve our course and programme delivery. Through the survey we practice the principle of Ngākau māhaki, creating space for students to speak of their experiences and current needs in regards to our teaching and their learning, enabling us to prepare ourselves for students who follow.

The survey is run towards the end of the semester (weeks 11-13) and designed to provide a robust and consistent approach of measuring course performance across all of Unitec.

What it involves

Each semester we ask students to provide feedback on course structure, content, assessment, teaching and practical (if applicable) via an online survey.

The base survey questions were informed by NZQA’s Key Evaluative Questions and Tertiary Education Indicators. Feedback on the questions themselves was received from students, teachers, Academic Leaders, HoPPs and Deans and the Unitec Ako Ahimura Committee. The survey questions can be viewed in the attached document on the right pane.

Administering the Survey

A new approach was introduced from in 2021 that improves the student experience (not being sent multiple emails for each course) and also provides flexibility for teaching staff to deploy the RateMyCourse survey portal directly to their students.

A single generic link has been developed for all teaching staff to distribute to their students. This is the link to send to your students:

www.unitec.ac.nz/ratemycourse

This link which can be used by all students will take them to the RateMyCourse portal where the student can enter their student ID and the list of courses that have been allocated to them will be shown for them to select and complete. Once they finish a survey, that course will be removed from the list and the student can keep returning to the portal using this same link.

This link will be the same over time (it will not change for each semester) and can be distributed to students via different channels (e.g. send through Moodle, email, course material, website, etc.)

One email will still be sent directly to the students at the start of the 3 week period (week 11) with their own personal link to their portal (they don’t need to enter their student ID if they use the link in this email). This replaces the numerous emails we used to send for each course they were enrolled in. Similar to previous course surveys, this email will be sent to the students ‘preferred email address’ that is saved in the student portal.

Teachers to allocate 15 minutes of class time

The survey period will be open for 3 weeks (weeks 11-14). Because we aren’t sending multiple emails directly to the students anymore, we will be relying much more on teaching staff to be fully engaged in this process and to encourage their students to participate any chance they get. It is also recommended that 15mins is set aside during class time for students to provide their feedback. Over a typical 14-week course, we feel asking a student to provide feedback for 3-5mins on that course is not too cumbersome and should be regarded and prioritised as an important stage of a course delivery.

Results

Individual class results are reported back to teachers who should then share their results with their students. Class, course, programme and school level results are available to Head of Schools and Academic Leaders. It is recommended that the information is saved to the programme H Drive and is used in course evaluation and planning (CEP) and PEP reports and as part of moderation processes.

Summarised institutional reporting is available via the interactive Power BI dashboard, ‘Student Course Surveys Dashboard’ which enables results to be filtered by school, programme, course, class, priority group and semester. This can be accessed HERE and is available to anyone with a Power BI licence. If you don’t have a license, please make a request to IT.

Action Planning

It is important that the survey outcomes are used to inform change, and that students are made aware of this. Action plans should be created at course and programme level to address any concerns in students’ feedback.

Closing the Loop

Where possible staff are strongly encouraged to share both their course survey results and the programme level results with their students. While this can be confronting in some instances, it also supports greater engagement and provides an opportunity to ‘test’ the proposed actions. It can also lead to richer conversations with students about their responses.