We asked faculty who used the pre-course survey option to comment about its usefulness

• Pre-course surveys are a great tool to make sure you have a good connection with your class and can hit the ground running with your materials, while making sure you aren’t leaving anyone behind.
• It is a great idea. It is especially helpful to hear what students expect to get out of the course.
• The pre-course survey allowed me to hear from students about their interests before the first day of class. I was able to use this information to emphasize course elements and focus my class more on student’s interests. I hope this will translate into an overall better experience for my students.
• I appreciate the opportunity to have this pre-course survey. This is something that I have done for years in my classes, and as a new faculty member at Pitt I appreciate having this format to ask questions to guide me as I interact with students and teach this semester. I created all my own questions and they were very useful for me to get to know the students a bit and learn about their interests.
• I might use pre-course evaluations in the future but adjust them to learn more about what students know coming into the class. I also used a short Canvas survey to gather this information and received more answers than in the pre-course survey.
• I found the pre-course survey somewhat valuable for the required, core course I was teaching. I think it would be more useful for elective courses to understand the students’ viewpoints better.

Alternate options for collecting student feedback throughout the term

OMET offers flexible options for gathering student feedback early in the term but there may be instances where other options are better suited for the course or faculty member, Here are some tips for writing good survey questions and alternate options for collecting student feedback throughout the term.

Qualtrics – Qualtrics can be used to administer surveys, collect and store data, and analyze results. Qualtrics includes powerful survey flow options to customize your survey. Surveys can be set up to be anonymous. The University of Pittsburgh has a site license for the Qualtrics Survey Service.

Top Hat is a powerful class polling and student engagement tool. Multiple surveys can be deployed at various points in the term and results collected in real time. Most survey questions can be created as anonymous. To get started, go to their registration page to create an account. No download or integration with an LMS is required.

Canvas offers the ability to survey students using the Quiz tool. The anonymous feature can be turned off/on once surveys are deployed.

More information can be found at the Canvas support page for creating course surveys in their environment.