Online course feedback: 5 errors to avoid

Students learn through online courses. Likewise, those who work in the world of eLearning can also learn from students. The feedback is essential to receive an evaluation from the students and to know how to improve the course. It is a satisfactory exchange on both sides: students feel appreciated because their point of view is valued while for the designer it is an excellent tool to improve the online course or the eLearning platform. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for mistakes to be made when creating the test. Let's see which ones are the most common and how to avoid them:

1. Ask too many questions

The questions are the means to collect the opinions of the students. However, the test cannot contain a large number of questions: the risk would be that many students would abandon the quiz. For this reason, just like the rest of the course, it is essential to carefully design the questions in order to request final feedback. What are the areas we want advice on? In this article, for example, you can find several ideas for creating your own quiz.

2. Offer a few answer options

It is not only the number of questions that is important, but also the type of answers available. While we should not exaggerate with open-ended questions, which, in any case, can be useful in limited quantities, we should not limit ourselves to questions that only admit "yes" or "no" as an answer. It is necessary to find a balance between the various types of answers, not only so as not to bore the students, but also in order to obtain really useful results.

3. Asking too general questions

It is completely useless, in order to improve the course, to ask extremely general questions. "Did you like the course?" or "How do you think the course can be improved?" are questions that, although in some cases they may prompt some students to make interesting considerations, in general they leave little room for useful comments.

4. Avoid difficult questions

Although some answers to the quiz may be difficult to accept, it is important to remember that it is mainly the negative comments that help us to improve. For this reason, you should not avoid "difficult" questions such as "Have you ever thought about leaving the course? Why?". This question not only allows us to understand if there is a real risk that students will drop out of the course, but also what are the reasons for dropping out.

5. Do not allow all students to provide feedback

The end of the course is a precious moment because students are still within reach to complete the quiz. However, if you do not take advantage of this moment, you run the risk of losing useful advice. To avoid this, it is necessary to contact the students through the tool already used during the course (forum, sms, chat, email, etc.) and kindly ask them to take a few minutes to complete the test.

Article taken from TheTechEdvocate