Student Surveys

"Not another survey!" The ISES (Integrated Student Exerience Surveys) Project

Collecting any kind of feedback is a balancing act: we know that you don't want to be bombarded with endless emails asking you to take part in surveys, or to spend valuable study time answering repeated or irrelevant questions.

At the same time, your experience is important to the OU - we want to know what we've got right, and what we need to improve. We also want to be better at telling you what we have done in response to your feedback.

To do this we need to collect feedback:

• More quickly
• All at once
• From more students

To do this, we're working to bring together the two biggest internal institutional surveys: The Tutor Student Feedback and the End of Module survey to create an integrated survey system that we've called ISES: The Integrated Student Experience Survey. The first integrated survey is SEaM, surveying your experience of studying your module.

Benefits for you:

• Get your voice heard
• Tell us about your tutor and your overall student experience at the same time
• Give feedback about other topics (advice and guidance, choices for your next module, exams and assessment) at times when it makes sense for you to do so
• See the results - how do other students feel about their experiences?
• Know what we have done as a result of your feedback.

Benefits for the OU

• Information at our fingertips
• Knowing of issues as they happen, and being able to address them in time to make a difference
• Learning what really works for our current students
• Improving the experience for current students, and all the cohorts that will come in the future.

The first ISES survey in development is the Student Experience on a Module (SEaM) survey which will ask students for the first time to provide feedback on their tutor and their wider module experience at the same time.

ISES project team, January 2013