Gathering student feedback at UCL

UCL is committed to working in partnership with students to build an inspirational student experience, so it is important to gather their feedback regularly. But which feedback methods are most effective and appropriate? 

There is great appetite across the university to better understand students' perceptions and experiences of the many adjustments made to teaching and support arrangements as a result of the pandemic. The Student Partnership team in the Office of the Vice-Provost (Education & Student Affairs) outlines the steps you should take if you are planning a survey, and alternative approaches to gathering feedback you might consider in place of survey. 

Preventing "survey fatique"

Institution-wide surveys at UCL are managed by the Student Partnership team within the Office of the Vice-Provost (Education & Student Affairs), who maintain a consistent survey cycle across the academic year.

The survey cycle includes nationwide surveys such as the National Student Survey (NSS) and the Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES), as well as internal surveys like New to UCL. The Student Partnership team leads promotional efforts for each of the institutional surveys, and ensures that results from the surveys are accessible for the appropriate audiences. Departments also gather their own feedback via activities such as Module Evaluation Questionnaires.

Students often report a feeling of "survey fatigue” when frequently asked to provide quantitative feedback.  The survey cycle helps guard against this reaction, and the resultant drop in participation, by ensuring that UCL undergraduates only complete one institutional survey in each academic year. 

What to do if you’re looking to gather feedback

If you’re looking to gather student feedback, it is important to remember that running a survey is just one of the ways in which you can get students’ perspectives. While surveys can potentially offer a decent source of quantitative feedback, there are a number of alternative feedback methods that may be more appropriate:

• You could ask for feedback from Student Representatives in your area, particularly ahead of a Staff-Student Consultative Committee (SSCC) meeting. Unitu, meanwhile, allows staff to pose questions to a wide cohort of students, for example across an academic department. For departments without Unitu, staff might want to encourage students to use Virtual Common Rooms (VCRs) to gather anecdotal feedback.
   
• Focus groups are particularly useful for understanding the reasons behind students’ preferences and exploring participants' reactions to the topic under discussion. If you’re looking to speak to students at different levels of study, and across different academic departments, the Student Experience Panel can help you engage with a wide cross-section of students. The Student Partnership team has compiled a guide to running focus groups.
   
• For more specific, quantitative feedback, you could use online polls such as Microsoft Forms or a Doodle Poll to get a quick response from students. Doodle Polls are particularly good for agreeing a time and date for an event. You could also use the Mentimeter service – an online polling, questioning and voting tool that can be integrated into teaching, whether online or face-to-face, synchronous or asynchronous. UCL has a dedicated resource centre for Mentimeter users.
   
• You could review student comments from previous surveys. Student comments from institutional surveys are categorised by the Student Partnership team and sent to Heads of Department and Departmental Survey Liaison Officers each year, as well as the leaders of UCL’s professional services. You can contact the Student Partnership team if you’d like to request access to these comments.   

What to be aware of before proposing a new survey

The recently-updated UCL Student Surveys Policy runs through what you should take into account if you are planning a survey.

The Policy states that all proposed student surveys should be discussed with the Student Partnership team for consideration. Before sending over a proposed survey, make sure you’ve considered the following:

• Which students will be asked to participate;
• What questions will be asked;
• How the responses will be analysed, and by whom. This is particularly important if you plan to ask for open text comments, which can be time-consuming to analyse;
• How the results will be used and where they will be shared;
• How the surveyor will inform the student community of changes implemented in response to the survey’s findings.

We also advise that you review UCL’s current institutional surveys to check if any of your proposed questions overlap with the content of the established surveys. This will avoid generating multiple, potentially contradictory data sets in response to similar questions.

Further help

Feel free to contact the Student Partnership team for further support with gathering student feedback.