Work is continuing on the virtual learning environment review here at the university. Recently, the focus has been on setting up a specification, or list of criteria, which any learning environment must fulfil, and getting feedback on this through a survey. The title image shows how all of these pieces fit together.
One of our key priorities in the review team is to make sure that student and staff feedback is collected and implemented in the evaluation of any VLE, and the way that this will be done is through surveys and focus groups. Getting the most out of these responses is important, so the questions need to be designed with a specific target in mind.
The questions are designed Jeopardy style: the statistic we wish to learn determines the range of responses we want from the survey, and the question is set so that it corresponds to the range of responses. If we want to know if a particular feature of a VLE was important, the responses must range from ‘very important’ to ‘not important’, and thus the question will be ‘How important is feature X?’
Forming the questions is only the start of the challenge. Once the responses have been gathered from students and staff, they will go through a sampling process to make sure that all possible user groups in the university population are proportionally represented. This technique is known as ‘stratified sampling’. Once the data from our sample has been collected it needs to be scaled up to the full population using further statistical analysis.
To read about the whole process of designing surveys, sampling data, and extracting statistically relevant information, see the full article here.
I am particularly enjoying this part of the review because, as a mathematician at heart, I am able to apply my skills and make a real contribution to the team. The feeling that I am contributing and making a real difference is something that would not be realised without the Excel internships. In turn, the skill of being able to apply your own skills in different areas is very valuable experience and is one of the things that makes these internships so rewarding.
By Alex McCormick
