Users' opinion to improve education

Context

Each year about 250 students follow the MOS module ‘Finding and using literature for your MSc thesis’ The module is taught by WUR library. In the course, students engage in many different learning activities, including readiness assurance tests, e-learning modules, and a peer-feedback cycle in Feedback fruits. The course concludes with a final assessment.

Over the past few years, the number of students per period started to increase. This became a challenge for our teacher's and the quality of education students received. Even though our course continued to receive positive student evaluations, we started to notice some recurring feedback that we wanted to act on. Our course was also redesigned a few years ago and the lecturers wanted to evaluate the new format.

All of this together triggered us to reflect on how both students and teachers experience the course. To do this, we used different types of user-centered techniques. The techniques allowed students to formulate insightful comments in an informal and playful setting. From the lecturer's perspective, this process generated concrete ideas.

From the lecturer’s perspective

The Library’s Education Support team organised brainstorming sessions to reflect on the course. We used methods, including the triple diamond method (positive and negative brainstorm) and MoSCoW analyses, and identified options to improve the course from the teachers’ perspectives. During the process the course’s learning outcomes were considered to safeguard the constructive alignment (alignment between learning outcomes, teaching methods and assessment).

From the students’ perspective

In addition to the students’ evaluations, we asked volunteer students to keep a diary of every class or to write a breakup letter at the end of the course. We also unexpectedly received some love letters as well, which was a pleasant surprise for our team. All the materials were fully anonymized before analysis.

The diaries, breakup letters and the standard course evaluations were analysed with affinity mapping.

Outcome

Tips and ideas were collected from the brainstorm sessions and the affinity mapping. The team voted on the tips and ideas, and the outcomes were used to improve the teaching materials or were immediately tested during the course when possible.

Some ideas were easy to implement, such as making minor adjustments to the availability of the materials to help students better spread their workload. Others required abit more work, such as including a pass and a fail example of our final assessment. In total, we worked onseveral points to improve the course both for the teachers and for the students.The changes were or will be implemented in small steps, followed by evaluating whether eachimplemented idea was a good addition. Through this iterative process the course is being improved step-by-step, while keeping the learning outcomes in check.