Why your feedback matters for Teaching & Learning quality at IT:U
Your feedback is a core input to IT:U’s continuous quality assurance (QA) cycle. Students’ and educators’ perspectives help us identify what works, address what doesn’t, and prioritize improvements that enhance learning outcomes and teaching practice.
You benefit from the feedback of the previous students. If the feedback affects ongoing topics, e.g. scheduling, it might affect your future semester(s) as well.
General principles
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Confidentiality: Your responses are kept confidential. No names or personal identifiers are shared with recipients.
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Forwarding: A QA team member forwards responses to the appropriate recipients. Each question group in the survey states who receives the feedback and in what form.
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Format: Recipients receive ratings as bar charts and/or frequency tables, plus the relevant verbatim comments. Other stakeholders see aggregated summaries only.
Release timing
- Educators receive their results only after the final grades have been awarded.
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Non‑educator recipients (e.g. Founding Director of Learning, the Student Ombudsperson, ...) receive their results as soon as they are available.
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Other stakeholders (e.g., program leadership) receive aggregated summaries as soon as available, typically at the end of the semester.
Format
Bar charts of the 1–5 rating statements provide a clear view of student agreement and, where ratings are predominantly low, the responsible units define, prioritise, and implement measures to improve those areas. Verbatim comments are synthesised into key takeaways for which actions are proposed, discussed with the responsible owners, potentially revised, and then implemented by the respective units—or a rationale is recorded when no action will be taken.
Impact
Educators gain insights into which teaching methods are particularly effective and where there is potential for improvement that they should implement in future courses.
Steps regarding other topics will be handled by the relevant units (e.g., the Learning Team, Study Program Coordinators/Study Program Committee, and timetabling/operations). The insights are fed into course and module enhancement and into semester‑long and annual QA reviews.
Once finalised, the “You said – We are doing/We did” table will be published on “digitalcampus” in the “changelog”-section. Although not yet public, the listed key takeaways and proposed measures are already being reviewed and, in part, implemented on an ongoing basis.
Current Challenges (without Blubbsoft)
In most courses, partial/continuous assessment grades are awarded during the term, which may influence response behavior. For this reason, results should be segmented into “before grade release” and “after grade release.” Given the already small cohort sizes and low overall response rates, this can sometimes lead to sub‑samples with only a single respondent. In addition, following up for each course on when partial/continuous grades and the final grade are/were released is very time‑consuming, and the replies are often incomplete or do not arrive at all.
Although a semi‑automated report is sent to the relevant recipients (e.g., Head of the Learning Team) immediately after a course evaluation closes, producing a clear, semester‑wide summary takes time. Key takeaways are derived in that summary, then transferred into the “You said – We are doing/We did” workflow with proposed actions that must be reviewed and approved by the responsible units. Implementation starts only thereafter and can take additional time depending on the measure. In short, moving from feedback to implementation can take several months, though some items can be implemented immediately.
A disciplined process—from data collection to approved measures—drives consistent, evidence‑based enhancement; but currently requires a lot of time.