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Update: How to get the Student Experience Survey into Canvas

Last updated on 05/29/2020

Important Note: Canvas “anonymous” surveys aren’t really anonymous — apparently it’s possible for faculty to identify submissions, though it takes a few steps of deliberate action! It’s therefore a good idea to do one of the following: (i) if using Canvas, be transparent about this flaw, but tell your students that you won’t de-anonymize their submissions. (ii) use something other than Canvas. TEP has already made a Qualtrics version of the survey, again providing a file and instructions on its use to make life easy! This is at the same https://blogs.uoregon.edu/keepteaching/student-feedback/ site.

5/28/2020: As you may know UO is not conducting the Student Experience Survey this term. Raghu Parthasarathy (Physics) explains how you can do it yourself in Canvas, for feedback. I’m including Raghu’s editorial comments on why we should have collected the survey, which I mostly agree with. While our administration loves to “blame it on the union” – regardless of the truth – cancelling this survey really was the union’s fault, with help from the administration.

For summer UO will run the survey through the usual software, but results will be just for instructor use – not shared with departments etc. (If you want you will be able to opt out even from that.) I expect that this will be the procedure for fall as well.

From Raghu Parthasarathy (Physics):

As you might know, UO is not asking students to fill out an end-of-term survey about their courses this quarter. Faculty are, however, free to ask students how things have gone and get feedback on the on-line experience. There’s an easy way to do this: TEP has made the “End of Course Student Experience Survey” available, and upload-able into Canvas! (Note that one can run an anonymous survey through Canvas.) To get it, go here.

Click the “End-of-Course Student Experience Survey” box; you’ll get to this site, which has in the tabs at the top a “Download” button that downloads everything as a zip file. The https://blogs.uoregon.edu/keepteaching/student-feedback/ page has instructions for importing this into Canvas. (I haven’t tried importing yet.)

Many in my own department (Physics) are happy about this, and we hope to gain insights into the Spring student experience either using the above survey or our own questions.

Editorial comments: I find it appalling that UO is not asking students to fill in an end-of-term survey, even a survey that isn’t used for faculty evaluation. Such a survey should (perhaps) not be used to evaluate faculty, but it should definitely be used to get a sense of what students experience have been, and to get feedback that will be *extremely* valuable if we end up teaching remotely again. My sources (more than one) report that not officially having a survey is the will of the office of the provost and the union, likely to shield faculty from the possibility of being evaluated. First of all, I think faculty should be able to handle the stress of evaluation — we do, in fact, get paid for this. (And yes, it can be unpleasant.) Second, we could gather information and have the restraint not to use it to evaluate people. Third, we could limit surveys to courses taught by TTF (or even tenured) faculty, shielding the more vulnerable instructors. Fourth, we should want, more than anything, to actually assess how the term has gone from the perspective of students, to shape what we might do in the future! From conversations, there’s widespread agreement about the fourth point, and it amazes me that we don’t have a coordinated plan for this.

Feel free to forward to your departments, random other people, etc., with or without the commentary.

best wishes,

Raghu

6 Comments

  1. Dog 05/28/2020

    The biggest thing for me is to try to gain an understanding
    of whether or not students paid any attention during the
    “live” part of “remote learnng”. I am not convince (yet) that
    “remote learning” has value added, relative to a totally ON line class. I doubt the actual survey question will shed much light on this. We really need interviews with groups of students by trained interviewers. I suspect other universities will do this and I look forward to hearing about there results.

    For Example:

    https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-04-02-what-students-are-doing-is-remote-learning-not-online-learning-there-s-a-difference

  2. thedude 05/28/2020

    WHy would I do this instead of surveymonkey? seems like a lot more work to do this?

    • uomatters Post author | 05/28/2020

      You’re still paying for a surveymonkey license?

    • A lot more work? There’s instructions and ready-made questions through TEP’s route. I imported the set to Canvas and timed how long it took me: less than 4 minutes. (It took me a few seconds to realize that the survey is in the “quiz” section of the course. Then I spent a little while adjusting the dates it’s available. Otherwise it would have taken even less time.)

      I might revisit this and add to the quiz before deploying it to my class, but as-is, it’s hardly time consuming.

      Of course, “the dude,” maybe you’re really fast at typing questions into Survey Monkey. That’s a fine route, too.

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