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Education Dive
How to survey college students about the shift online
Experts recommend moving quickly and asking open-ended questions to get
the best data on how the spring term went and what changes are needed.
Natalie Schwartz
May 12, 2020
The coronavirus has forced college instructors to transition to virtual
teaching. But many have little to no experience doing so remotely, much
less creating effective online courses in a matter of weeks.
Students are struggling with the change, too. On Twitter, several
widely shared tweets about the difficulties of transitioning to an
online term have been met with a chorus of students virtually sharing
their experiences about needing more flexibility from instructors and
being unimpressed with remote classes.
Within this environment, many colleges are looking to improve
communication with their students by surveying them about what's
working and what isn't. Beyond gathering data for post-mortems for the
unexpected and unconventional spring term, schools are also looking for
ways to improve online instruction should the pandemic force campuses
to remain shuttered in the fall.
To get feedback from as many students as possible, higher ed experts
say every type of college should be conducting surveys. They should be
easy to take and include open-ended questions that can capture a
diversity of experiences.
"Everyone is grappling with this," said Christine Wolff-Eisenberg,
manager of surveys and research at Ithaka S+R, a consultancy that
created a survey for higher ed institutions to use to assess their
COVID-19 response. "It's not the kind of thing that's isolated to just
one part of the country or one part of the sector."
Survey early and often
The Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium (HEDS) worked quickly to
make a survey that its member colleges — which are mostly liberal arts
schools — and other institutions could use to assess how their spring
term was going. Schools could adapt the template to fit their needs.
Questions cover how students thought faculty and staff members helped
them with the transition online and communicated information about the
pandemic. It also polls students about which instructional methods are
the most and least effective and whether they plan to return in the
fall semester. As of May 11, it had garnered responses from more than
30,000 students across 56 schools.
"It was a very hard transition for students, faculty and the
institutions, and we thought the officials we work with would need some
feedback as soon as possible to how that transition was going because
it was so abrupt," said Charles Blaich, director of HEDS.
HEDS is posting preliminary results that may help administrators make
changes more quickly. For instance, it found that students who are
confident they will return in the fall are also more likely to feel
connected to their institution and that their school has done a good
job at protecting them from the health effects of COVID-19.
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