Student Satisfaction with a Web-based Anonymous Feedback System
Judy Sheard, Lecturer,
School
of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash
University, Victoria, Australia. judy.sheard@csse.monash.edu.au
JanMiller, Lecturer,
School
of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash
University, Victoria, Australia.
jan.miller@csse.monash.edu.au
Sita Ramakrishnan,
Senior Lecturer, School of Computer
Science and Software Engineering, Monash
University, Victoria, Australia. sita.ramakrishnan@csse.monash.edu.au
John Hurst, Associate
Professor, School of Computer
Science and Software Engineering, Monash
University, Victoria, Australia. john.hurst@csse.monash.edu.au
Keywords
Discussion forum, anonymous feedback, tertiary students, anonymity
Abstract
An anonymous feedback facility / discussion forum is provided for students
in a number of computing courses within the School of Computer Science
and Software Engineering at Monash University. The facility was introduced
in 1997 and since that time has been incorporated in a range of subjects
within the School. Within each subject there has been a growth in student
usage of this facility. An impressionistic view is that it is widely used
by many students, however the provision of anonymity has made it impossible
to establish the percentage of students who are passively or actively using
the facility. It has also been difficult to determine how useful anonymous
feedback has been for providing educational support to students and fulfilling
the original intention of providing accurate feedback to teaching staff.
Recently there has been a growing concern among staff that the facility
is giving a distorted view of student needs and opinions. This paper reports
on a survey of students in eight subjects at undergraduate and graduate
level. The survey was designed to determine student usage of the anonymous
feedback facility/discussion forum, their satisfaction with its value as
a help facility and their perceptions of its effectiveness as a feedback
facility to staff.
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