Gathering feedback from your students is one thing. But gathering meaningful feedback, especially at a large scale, is a whole different ball game. Thoughtful, helpful comments are often mixed with those that are not, like responses that are too brief to be insightful, irrelevant comments or garbled sentences that make no sense. Multiply this with the size of your student body and you will quickly find yourself scrolling through thousands and thousands of rows of data, eyes glazed over, while trying to separate good-quality feedback from poor-quality feedback.

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Impact of poor-quality feedback

Any action you take is only as good as the data behind it. Everyone knows this. But dealing with poor-quality feedback can pose significant challenges, such as:

• Reducing productivity. Sifting through mountains of poor-quality data is highly inefficient and not a good use of time. Educators and university staff are unlikely to enjoy the tedious manual work and this could result in lowered morale.
• Lack of actionable feedback. Without clear patterns emerging from the data, educators will not easily know what needs to be improved or how they should prioritise their efforts. This is akin to trying to read a guidebook with all the sentences out of order. The actions needed to be taken are somewhere in there but it is not easily understood.
• Missed opportunities. The more challenging it is to find valuable feedback, the less likely it is that educators will actually use student feedback to guide their decisions. This could result in inaction, delays in needed improvements or even efforts being directed towards unnecessary fixes.
• Organisational mistrust. Students waiting to see how their feedback will bring about change might be disappointed if change takes too long to arrive. Even worse, they might conclude that their feedback does not actually make an impact and would have little reason to contribute their thoughts in the future.

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These challenges can feel intimidating. As a result, it can be easy to shy away from committing to making data-driven decisions. But that would not be the path towards building a great student experience. Making decisions for students without the voice of the students guiding us would be like flying blind.

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So instead of continuing to painstakingly wade through heaps of data or avoiding it altogether, the better question is: How can we easily and quickly separate good-quality feedback from poor-quality feedback so we can focus our energies on taking meaningful action?

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StudentPulse’s new artificial intelligence feature serves up good-quality feedback on a silver platter

Imagine this: As they go through their journey with your educational institution, students regularly provide you with feedback by the thousands. But instead of the feedback coming to you in an avalanche, the most useful ones are discovered, immediately prioritised and brought to your attention. You are able to focus on studying key comments, brainstorming with your university team and strategising on what action you might take to improve the student experience.

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Here at StudentPulse, we combine microsurveys with real-time data analytics to empower your educational institution to improve student experience. The artificial intelligence technology behind our platform is able to process and analyse student feedback on a large scale, rank the quality of the feedback received and serve it to you in order of importance. Over time, as you provide feedback to the platform - just via one-click - on which comments you find useful or not, our AI technology will better learn what you deem most relevant and prioritise that information for you to receive.

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