In part six of the MyKoha series find guidance on how to conduct a survey with your students
Getting feedback from students is important. It lets you know what’s going well and not so well, and it’s an opportunity for our students to be heard.
Surveys have been made easy, there’s very little for you to do, but there are a few important things you’ve got to do:
Before you start
Publish your Canvas course – surveys run through Canvas. If your course isn’t published, your students won’t receive any surveys
Make sure you are a Teacher on the course – there are multiple roles in Canvas, but only Teachers will be surveyed as part of the Kaiako Evaluation Survey and only Teachers will receive survey reports. Contact your Campus Administrator if you aren’t a Teacher on your course.
Make sure you have accepted the invitation to the course – when you are invited to a Canvas course as a Teacher it’s important you accept the invitation (look at the top of the Home page in Canvas and Accept any invitations).
Make sure you know the date of the end of your course – knowing this means that you’ll know when to schedule time in class to complete the survey. Check in the Setting page of your Canvas course to find out.
In Class
Schedule time in class for students to complete all surveys. There are four surveys:
- First Impressions Survey (FIS)
- Start of Course Survey
- End of Course Survey
- Kaiako Evaluation Survey
However, you will only need to schedule time twice in class to complete them, once during Week 2 or Week 3 and then again during the last weeks of the course. Students complete the FIS and Start of Course Survey together and then they complete the End of Course and Kaiako Evaluation Survey together.
Talk about it! Encourage your students that you need their feedback to improve your course. Make sure students know that the survey is anonymous and their quality feedback will help us understand their needs and make improvements.
Let your students know before any of the surveys are open, that they will be surveyed. Here’s a few words to help you do this:
In Week 2 of the course we’re going to ask you to complete a survey about your experiences so far at MIT. It’ll cover application and enrolment and how you’re settling in to study here.
In the last couple of weeks of the course we’re going to ask you to complete an end of course survey. The survey is about the course and about the lecturers teaching it. We want to know what’s good about the course, and about how we can make this course better for future learners.
Your feedback will help us to improve. The surveys will be announced in Canvas and a link will come to your MIT email address. We’re going to schedule time in our course on course date for you to complete the surveys. If you want to know more about the surveys you can go to MIT’s website and look up ‘Student survey’.
Chasing up students
Follow-up with students who are yet to complete the survey to do so before the window closes. You will receive email reminders about this.
You can view the response rates for your course (the evaluations are anonymous, so you won’t know who hasn’t completed, only the response rate). You can see whether students have completed or that their surveys are in progress.
You can access your survey dashboard here. The pie chart [1] below shows the total response rate for all courses, however the list at the bottom [2] shows all courses. Scroll to the right to see number of students invited to take the survey and the number completed and in progress [3].
Hints and Tips
- Publish your Canvas course (this is the most important thing you can do to make sure your surveys will run)
- Contact Evaluations@manukau.ac.nz if you have any questions.
For more in the MyKoha series
1 My Koha: MIT’s Survey System
2 MyKoha: First Impression Surveys
3 MyKoha: Start of Course Survey
4 MyKoha: End of Course Survey
5 MyKoha: Lecturer Evaluations
6 MyKoha: How to conduct a survey