Student Feedback Surveys

Each semester or teaching period, students are invited to evaluate courses using a centrally supported online survey system. The surveys are conducted in a confidential manner because student identifiers are kept with each response. However, students' identities are protected by the University, are not released to teaching team members and are normally only accessible to systems administrator for data management and aggregated reporting purposes. This means these surveys are not anonymous (where no student identifiers are kept with responses).

For the majority of courses, an email invitation will be sent to students at the beginning of Week 4 (Mid-Semester Survey) and Week 14 (End-Semester Survey) and a ‘big yellow button’ will appear on students' course sites (StudyDesk). Students access their surveys by clicking on the yellow button, following the link in their email, or by accessing the Student Survey homepage (USQ login required) directly.

In some cases, courses will not have surveys because the following criteria are applied to ensure only appropriate courses are surveyed:

• Courses must have 10 or more students enrolled to be surveyed.
• Courses that typically have significant placement, practical, work integrated learning, or a supervisory component are not surveyed.

Students enrolled in courses excluded from the formal Student Feedback Survey will have the opportunity to participate in alternative methods of student feedback collection. The course teaching team will advise students how this data will be collected. Students should be aware that alternative methods could take a variety of forms, including but not limited to, formal or informal data collection and feedback that is not confidential.

Once the surveys close, results are reported to staff and released to this dashboard automatically and in aggregated formats only.

The previous My Opinion survey was updated to the new Student Feedback Survey in 2020. The retirement of MyOpinion and introduction of the Student Feedback Survey were endorsed by the University's Academic Board in February 2020. The new Student Feedback Survey consists of three questions (two scale selections questions and an open comment). Only results from the scale questions are displayed in this dashboard.
The questions for all surveys (Student Feedback, English for Academic Purposes, and the 8 Week Teaching Period) are as follows:

Survey	Questions & Type
Mid-Semester	I have taken advantage of the learning opportunities offered in this course so far. (5-point Likert scale: 1-Strongly disagree | 2-Disagree | 3-Neither agree nor disagree | 4-Agree | 5-Strongly agree) I am satisfied with the course so far. (5-point Likert scale: 1-Strongly disagree | 2-Disagree | 3-Neither agree nor disagree | 4-Agree | 5-Strongly agree) Any other comments. (Open comment - not released publicly)
End-Semester English for Academic Purposes 8 Week Teaching Period	I have taken advantage of the learning opportunities offered in this course. (5-point Likert scale: 1-Strongly disagree | 2-Disagree | 3-Neither agree nor disagree | 4-Agree | 5-Strongly agree) Overall, I am satisfied with this course. (5-point Likert scale: 1-Strongly disagree | 2-Disagree | 3-Neither agree nor disagree | 4-Agree | 5-Strongly agree) Any other comments. (Open comment - not released publicly)

1. Every course with five or more responses are aggregated and reported below. Click on the search bar to show the list of courses or search for a course.
2. Once selected, the dashboard updates to show all available results from two previous whole years and the current year (if any results are available).
3. The charts on the left show the results for the question "I have taken advantage of the learning opportunities offered in this course" per semester or teaching period with available data.
4. The charts on the right show the results for the question "Overall I am satisfied with this course" per semester or teaching period with available data.
5. Hover over the bars to show relevant information including the frequencies and summary statistics.
6. Click on the legend to filter the charts by the scale items ("1-Strongly disagree", "2-Disagree", "3-Neither agree nor disagree", "4-Agree", "5-Strongly agree", "No response").
7. Some courses have multiple semesters or teaching periods of data. Scroll down in the dashboard to show all semesters listed in order of semester then years so that like-for-like semesters/teaching periods can be viewed over multiple years.

The surveys ask students to select one (1) scale item out of five (5). These are listed across the x axes of the charts (point 1 below). For each scale, the total number of selections are included as the 'Frequencies' on the y axes (point 2 below) while the 'Percentage of Enrolments' is listed as the percentage value above the bar (point 3 below). As there are students who have not responded to the survey, those non-responses have also been listed on the x axes under 'No response' (point 4 below).



For each bar, hovering over the bar will display additional information about the results. These include:

• Number of students (Frequencies): The total counts for the bar. Each student per question is counted as one (1).
• Item % of enrolments & count: For the bar listed, the percentage is calculated using the 'Number of students' as the numerator and the 'Total survey population' as the denominator. This then gives an indication of the number of student in the course who selected a particular 'Response selected' or did not respond (No response frequencies).
• Total survey population: As students withdraw from their courses at different times in the semester, a record of the total enrolments at the time of surveying is kept and used as the survey population. This may be different from the course enrolments reported elsewhere.
• Total responses: Lists the total responses to the survey received for the courses.
• Response rate: The percentage of students who responded out of the 'Enrolments at the time of surveying'.
• Mean: A simple arithmetic mean of all numeric values for the scale items calculated as to the sum of all responses divided by the number of responses received.
• Median: The mid-point of the responses.
• Standard deviation: The measure of dispersion from the mean (or how widely distributed the responses are from the mean).

If a course has a large yellow 'No response' bar, this means that the survey has a low response rate. That is, not many students completed their survey. For surveys with large numbers of 'No responses', you should interpret the results of the surveys with caution because the representation of the student experience is low. That is, if a scale item is listed at 10%, this means that one-in-ten students selected that scale which is generally considered not representative of a population. However, scales with 30% indicate a representation of one-in-three or almost a third of a population. Even at 30%, some consider this to be barely representative of a population.