► Getting feedback from your students using the Surveymonkey Student Reps Template

Student Reps – getting feedback from your students using the Surveymonkey Student Reps Template.

The key role of being a student rep is to represent the views of your students as accurately as you can. This can be difficult if you have not had any experience of representation before. However, don’t despair, as SUBU has developed a tool to help you generate student feedback accurately and usefully in a way that should help get your points across in a way that BU will find useful.
Reps from previous years will be familiar with the old “Feedback Form” that was used to fill in responses from students and was then forwarded to Programme Administrators/Leaders for inclusion in Programme and other meetings. Over the last 2 years we have noticed that this way of getting students’ feedback led to a couple of problems:-

1. Reps often filled in the forms without any concrete evidence to support their views. In some cases, Reps were even filling in forms based on their own personal views without doing any research.
2. The Feedback Form often involved a fair bit of work for the Rep, which they often found difficult to commit to.
   
3. The summary feedback of the Rep required interpretation and précising of all student feedback, which sometimes led to misinterpretation and/or overlooking some important issues.

In essence, SUBU felt that the system was doing well at delivering quantity of Feedback forms to programmes, but the quality was often questionable. For 2011/12 we have therefore developed a new way of collecting and delivering student feedback to programmes and schools to try to drive up quality as well as quantity.

This year the feedback system that we are asking Student Reps to use is based in Surveymonkey. We are using this after trialling it last year and getting very positive results. The benefits of generating your feedback using this method are:-

1. You can present the students’ voice in the way that they said it; therefore eliminating any misinterpretation or loss of data or opinion.
2. Whereas the previous method required a report as a minimum and survey data as optional, this method puts survey data at the heart of feedback, and a report from the rep becomes the optional, but preferable part.
3. There is less work required to deliver the bare minimum to be of use to BU in understanding the student voice i.e. you only need to generate a survey and then save and forward the results, rather than write a full report in your own words. You can also upload a template Rep Report from the Student Rep Toolkit if you need it.

In order to use the Surveymonkey feedback template for your particular course and/or unit you will need to follow the steps below.

Using the Template for Reps to generate student feedback for meetings

1. Log on to BUstudentreps Surveymonkey account. (Contact SUBU VP Education to get the current password)
2. Click on the “Create survey” green button at the top right of the screen.
   
3. Choose “Copy existing survey” and then scroll down to choose “Template survey for Reps”
   
4. In the text box “Title”, type the name of your survey using the format… ‘School, Programme, Level, Unit’ as appropriate (e.g. Media BA Public Relations C Marketing). This will make it easier to track alongside all the other surveys in the account.
   
5. Read and edit the text of the questions in the template, adding your programme/unit details where it is obvious to do so. (Don’t forget to delete the introductory text on the first page or all your students will see this!) Try not to change any questions as these have been generated using sound research principles. Feel free to add your own questions if you want.
   
6. When you are happy, click “send survey” at the top right of the page.
   
7. The new page will now show your unique URL for your survey. Copy and paste this link to any communication you then send to students to complete. Academic Administrators will also be able to forward the survey on to all those students on your course, if you are having difficulty contacting them yourself.
   
8. Sit back and watch the data come in! NB. You need to get at least 5 responses to start making your feedback valid. Your own response counts within that 5 too!
   

When you have collected all your feedback, you need to get it to the right people, and also use it write your own report. Here is how we suggest you do this.

Downloading and sending your feedback

1. Log on to the BUstudentreps Surveymonkey account.
2. Click on your survey from the list shown
   
3. Click the “Analyse results” tab on the top right of the page
   
4. From the left hand menu, click on “Download Responses”
   
5. Click the box that says “include open-ended responses”
   
6. Choose the format that you want download. We recommend PDF so that you can easily print and also send to others in an understandable format.
   
7. Click the “Request download” button at the bottom.
   
8. From the Download History list, click to download your survey in the format that you have asked.
   
9. Save this to your files in the normal way and then use it to write your report and/or send it to your programme leader and/or administrator.
   

If you expand your report and key findings then that would really enhance your representation. There are many other features in Surveymonkey that can be used to show your results - such as charts and graphs. If you have the time, you can play around with these to produce some nice visual aids to really impress your audience.