Teaching Resources
Quick Course Check Tool
Tool created by David Bray, Professor and Coordinator, BA IT Networking
School of Advanced Technology
Survey tools can be powerful for gathering valuable feedback from students. Collecting this information at pivotal stages within your course allows you to be responsive to student needs and expectations.
David uses an Excel document to capture anonymous information from his students during his class. He will print one copy of this tool and send it around his class. Each student will then tick off, anonymously, their response to each question. David will prepare questions based upon what he wishes to survey.
Download David's Quick Course Check Tool
How the Survey Tool Works
In the centre column, record the response that reflects the ideal outcome for that measure.
The far-left responses reflect "too little" while the far-right responses represent "too much".
In terms of distribution, the goal is to have most of the checks in the centre column. (Or in some cases, such as "course difficulty", slightly to the right).
Instructions to Students
David tells his students to answer every question with a single tally mark under the answer that most closely matches their true assessment in each row. After they've considered every row, the sheet should be passed along to the next student. As encouragement, he mentions to the students that this is their chance to quickly and easily provide an honest, anonymous interim report that has the power to affect the course immediately.
For larger classes, two or more sheets can be circulated and tallied later. For ease of tabulation, students should be told to use the "four lines with a strike through it" notation for 5 tick marks.
Benefits of this Tool
- Quick to distribute and easy to tally
- Tally marks are completely anonymous
- Very low time investment required for both students and professor
- Gives immediate qualitative/quantitative measure of how things are going "so far" with respect to a specific aspect of the course
- Allows both students and prof to express their expectations and re-align them, if necessary
- May bring to light misconceptions of course expectations that can be clarified
On one occasion, David used this tool to express that the 6 hour per week course that he was teaching required an additional 6 hours of additional work outside of regular class time. Through this tool, some students had expressed their beliefs that the amount of additional work outside of class was too much. This was an opportunity for David to refer back to the course requirements to explain why the additional work time was necessary.
Thank you David for sharing this useful tool.