Gather Feedback

• What does the learning environment you create afford your students?

• Are your students attuned to all the affordances?

• Show your students where to look, not what to see

• Take an holistic approach to student education

• Survey your students in an holistic manner

• Consider your alternatives for survey tools

• Consider using a pre-course survey

The teaching environments that we create for students affords them certain opportunities to learn.

Affordance - A quality, characteristic of, or clue offered by an object that provides information about the purpose of an object or how to interact with it.

What does the environment you create afford your students?

If affordances are to be perceived, there must be information about them. They are designed to educate. However, learners may or may not be aware of all the affordances that are available to them.

Attunement - The ability to perceive affordances for the purpose of acting on them.

Are your students attuned to all the affordances?

As teachers, our goal then is to first guide/educate our students' attention. Ideally, we show them where to look and not necessarily what to see. This makes up our course’s content and its delivery. The survey then becomes a tool for (hopefully!) answering the questions:

1. What are my students attuned to and why?

2. What aren't they attuned to and why?

However, students may not be attuned to the affordances we provide for many reasons. We need to think beyond our course’s content and its delivery. We need to think about - and care for - the whole student.

An holistic approach, for example, could include three focal points:

1. Technical - Our course’s content and its delivery. Here we are concerned about increasing our students’ level of expertise.

2. Cognitive - This represents students’ intellectual abilities and their learning skillset. Here we are concerned about making good learners.

3. Social-Emotional - The ability of students to get the best from themselves (i.e., the emotional) and from others (i.e., the social). Here we are concerned about the creation of good people.

To teach holistically then, not only do we want to know if our students are attuned to what we are teaching but we ourselves need to show that we are attuned to our students.

Here are some typical course content and delivery type student feedback questions organized into categories.

Here are some holistic student feedback questions that can create an awareness of who are students are beyond learners in our classes.

If you are using Moodle to teach your course, you can use the Questionnaire activity to collect student feedback.

You could also use a Google form to collect the feedback which is created and delivered outside of Moodle.

Mid-course surveys are a popular tool for collecting feedback from students as it gives teachers the time to make some potential revisions before the end of the course. If you take on the challenge of teaching students more holistically then a pre-course survey also makes sense. First, if conducted along with a mid-course survey it will give you a point of comparison. Second, a pre-course survey gives you a great opportunity to get to know your students.

Here are some pre-course survey question ideas.