Asking for, and getting student feedback at the end of an e-Learning course, sets a good precedent for future students, and is a part of a model course design. To add to it, taking intermittent feedback like at the end of lessons, makes the process shorter, easier, and more effective. But how and why is this concept important?
In this article, we are going to explore whether student feedback can help you improve your LearnDash course.
Advantages of Student Feedback
The major beneficiaries of student feedback are a course’s authors. Since they are designing the course from start to finish, giving every student the best possible experience is always the aim.
Let’s understand how feedback helps course creators.
#1 Understanding student perceptions
Receiving honest and candid feedback from students helps authors understand how the students are perceiving your course. Students can point out which parts of a course are difficult to understand, tough to navigate, too vague, or not challenging enough. This helps authors make the necessary amendments for improving those parts of the course and giving the students what they are expecting out of it.
#2 Improving instructional design
The way your course is presented is also equally important. Sometimes, the creators or designers may not realize that the manner in which a complex lesson is structured is not simple enough for the students to grasp easily. Asking for a feedback from students can help authors change the way content is delivered to make these topics easier to learn and understand. Obtaining a detailed feedback can help them incorporate more explanations, graphical illustrations, or practical examples/experiments to enable a better understanding of the lesson.
#3 Simplifying course structure
Not surprisingly, feedback is also important to understand whether the overall structure of the course is working. This can include both, navigation and order of topics. Asking students whether they were able to navigate the entire course easily to find what they were looking for quickly helps authors know whether the design or roadmap is user-friendly or not. Similarly, students may feel that some topics can be rearranged to immediately follow some others, or vice-versa. If this enables better grasping of concepts, then the course can benefit from this feedback.
#4 Perfecting course content
This is one of the obvious advantages of obtaining student feedback. The content of a course is its primary aspect, and it must fulfill a student’s learning objectives. Whether it is or isn’t is best known through feedback from students, since they are the ones actually studying the material. The main aim of any course is fulfilling expectations of students who take it up with regards to learning. Hence, student feedback on course content is extremely valuable and important.
#5 Improving course support
Throughout the duration of an e-Learning course, students are bound to have queries and doubts regarding various aspects. This is why a student support center and FAQ section are crucial to have. Every time a student refers to the FAQs or sends a query to be addressed by a course representative, ask him/her for feedback on their experience once the issue is sorted out. This helps authors understand whether the queries or doubts were cleared effectively, and the students were able to get back to learning quickly.
#6 Building trust
Asking students for an honest feedback about the course and making the necessary changes helps build a level of trust between course authors and students. This is where a rating system works wonders. A positive feedback and high ratings signify that students are perceiving the course as worthwhile and useful. This is a big trust factor for potential students, in a learning scenario where there’s no face-to-face interaction with teachers/authors.
#7 Maintain Course Quality
If your LearnDash website allows multiple teachers to create their own courses, then a feedback system becomes essential. A multi-author website that has various defined instructor roles particularly requires feedback because of the varying teaching methods and course content. Sometimes, instructors bring their own content to a multi-author course website. In that case, student feedback helps the admin ensure that the quality of teaching and course content is top notch, helpful, easy to understand, and consistent.
How to Collect Student Feedback
As goes with most things WordPress, the way to collect student feedback on your LearnDash website is to integrate a student feedback system with the help of a plugin.
Ideally, a single system should provide you with options to allow students to rate courses, leave reviews and provide teachers a feedback.
The Ratings, Reviews and Feedback plugin for LearnDash works to this end, providing courses others a single platform that addresses their needs.
This comprehensive system allows you to display reviews and ratings publicly for courses, and allows course authors the option to collect student feedback using forms at any point in the course.
Parting Thoughts
The popularity and image of your course will depend ultimately on whether it gives the students what they want in terms of a positive learning experience and fulfills their study objectives. If your LearnDash course is able to meet the expectations that your learners have from it, then their feedback will be positive. And if in case the expectations aren’t met, then your willingness to listen and alter the course will build a great level of trust and positive attitude towards it.
So think from your students perspective and get their thoughts on board by integrating a solid feedback system.
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