If you're a course instructor, you can consider using these two interesting applications of the WebCT quiz/survey tool: getting anonymous student feedback on a course or important issue, and holding an election. In fact, the Laptop Evaluation Committee is using the WebCT survey tool to get feedback from thousands of students on the student laptop program, and the faculty Senate is using WebCT for its next election, where voting will be on-line and WebCT will automatically collect and tabulate the results. You can easily incorporate these types of WebCT applications into your course, such as a student survey asking for general feedback on your course. Another option is using WebCT to give students a vote on an important course issue; for example, ask them how a part of the course should be conducted, or how they would prefer to be evaluated.
One of the best and easiest ways to get feedback from your students on how they think the course is going (or went) is to create a short survey questionnaire in WebCT. Students can do the survey in class on a laptop, or anywhere outside the classroom on a PC or public workstation on their own time.
You can give the survey in the mid semester and/or the last day of class. Another twist would be to give the survey part way through the course, make some changes to the course, and then give a follow up questionnaire to the same students to see how they felt about the changes. To get the most candid opinions, make sure students know in advance that their responses are anonymous, that there is no way of tying their specific responses to their name.
When designing the survey, questions can be short answer, paragraph, or multiple choice format, allowing one or more answers, although you may find that the simplest questions can be the most telling. Some sample survey questions appear below.
___ On-line syllabus ___ Reading assignments ___ General course-related information ___ On-line quizzes ___ Bulletin board postings ___ Linked discussion lists ___ Running on-line applications ___ Submitting assignments ___ Links to other course-related Web sites ___ On-line articles
A big advantage of the WebCT survey tool is that it does all the tedious tabulating of results for you automatically. Some of the useful statistics WebCT will calculate for you are:
You can also keep track of statistics for a particular question over several iterations of the survey by updating the Global Statistics for questions in a survey. All of the statistics gathered for each question on the survey so far will be updated in the Question Database for future reference. The designer may then use the Stats button in the Question Database section to view cumulative statistics. For multiple choice questions, global student response frequencies may also be kept, and are updated separately from the performance statistics.
Although the survey suggested above may appear somewhat unscientific compared to a more serious research study, it is more likely to be used, as it is relatively easy to do and provides data that is immediately collected and analyzed. You may be very surprised at how much valuable feedback you can quickly obtain about the way your students learn, and what works and what doesn't. Making course modifications based on student survey feedback can generate a more exciting learning environment for both students and instructor.
If you would like more information on how to use WebCT in your course, or have any other WebCT-related questions, please contact Instructional Multimedia Consultant Don Bell by directing electronic mail to belld2@rpi.edu.
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