STEP 2: AMEND

Canvas data provides a starting point, but don’t rely solely on a dashboard to determine if your students are engaging required material. Test your assumptions! The "Review, Amend, Apply" framework provides an opportunity to engage students as partners in improving learning environments. When asking for student feedback, let them know that the data collected is being used to make your course better.  Emphasize that they can play a role in improving the course by helping you understand the data you see. 

Goals

Amend your understanding with feedback from students that will help you understand the learning data and clarify action to take.

• Consider the questions you have that students can address.
• Compose questions that guide student responses and that are most likely to solicit honest and useful responses.
• Identify a method for gathering student feedback that allows students to respond honestly to questions.
• Interpret learning data and student feedback. 

Ask Your Students

The learning data that you gather can reveal issues, but cannot pinpoint causes. In fact, different behaviors can look very similar online or may be attributable to a variety of circumstances.

For instance, the data might indicate that the majority of your student never accessed a resource you felt to be important preparation for class. Do you attribute this to apathy? Technical difficulties? Or perhaps they missed content that didn't appear in their class To-Do list? 

 The numbers don't speak for themselves. Asking students questions about their behavior will help you interpret data correctly and clarify next steps.

Gathering Feedback

The Canvas Quiz tool can be used to create an anonymous quiz; you can also add points to incentivize student engagement. Unlike a traditional quiz, you can offer points associated with the survey, instead of individual questions. This is a convenient way to gather student feedback. Note that surveys will not appear in the course To-Do list (consider sending an announcement with the survey link).

It's important to understand that instructors can circumvent the anonymous feature of a survey by unchecking "Keep Submissions Anonymous." In this case, ethical and responsible practice has to do what the technology doesn't do: keep student submissions anonymous. Consider having this conversation with your students. If this poses a significant barrier, use another survey tool like Google Forms or Qualtrics.

Note that not all useful feedback is anonymous! Review the Example #3: Quiz Case Study for an example of identifiable student feedback integrated into course activities.

Understanding the Data

You might consider approaching reviewing your students’ feedback as you would analyzing data of any sort: look for trends and patterns, identify outliers, and triangulate their responses with what you observed in the data. Consider these tips when reviewing student feedback. 

 

Support Wherever you are in the process of forming questions, exploring tools and data, engaging students and making a plan for impactful change, support is available!  Consider reaching out to your local academic technology professionals, or contact central services at TeachingSupport@UMN.