Student Voice offers real-time updates of all module results pages and departmental/faculty results pages. This allows individual staff to view how their class is responding as well as allowing departments and faculties to find areas where extra encouragement should be given. Access to these pages through the institutions single sign-on login is currently in development.
Surveys are scheduled for release depending on departmental requirements and are only open for a pre-determined time.
Progress through the survey is automatically saved and only the remaining questions will be asked if a student leaves then returns later to the survey.
For students who do not complete the survey immediately email reminders are sent throughout the survey week. The number and timing of the email reminders can be controlled centrally or chosen at a department level.
From its inception and throughout its use at Strathclyde Student Voice was designed around a closed feedback loop between students and staff. We have also found that having the primary survey period during the semester allows staff to clear up any misconceptions or make changes while the class is running. A supplementary survey can also be carried out at the end of each semester to answer questions that cannot be answered while the class is being taught.
The standard approach taken in Student Voice is as follows. The Student Voice survey is open to students for 1 week. Once this closes the academic staff have 1 week to respond to the student comments. This very quick turnaround is key to fostering a sense that student comments are taken seriously.
A key feature of Student Voice is the wide range of automatically generated reports that mirror the institutions structure and enable staff and students to quickly access the relevant information and insights generated by Student Voice.
For staff, comprehensive reports are generated for heads of department, year advisors and course directors containing just the results of the modules they are interested in. Reports can also be created for arbitrary sets of modules that cut across institutional structures such as joint honours degrees, thematic and discipline subject groups and special interest modules such as distance learning or Graduate Apprenticeships (which have been successfully surveyed by Student Voice).
Personalised reports are generated for each student showing the results and lecturer response for each of their modules.
The automatic generation and delivery of surveys and reminders to students, as well as lecturers getting web-based access to the student feedback on their own modules, means that there is no real administrative load beyond supplying the student enrolment data.
A significant proportion of the value in class evaluation is derived from the free text, qualitative feedback. Student Voice displays this data in the order in which it was submitted to give staff an unbiased view of the comments.
Student Voice also ofers an automated categorisation system that will work to highlight positive and negative comments and topics mentioned in free text comments to allow staff to more easily judge the content of any given comment at glance.
The Student Voice approach is to minimise the amount of personally identifiable data stored on the system, so all student responses are fully anonymous. If segmenting by certain characteristics, this will always be carried out in such a way that student anonymity is still maintained.