Gather student feedback during the summer term

Opportunities to gather student feedback are essential for improving the quality of units, including the teaching quality and students’ learning experience. Data from the Student Evaluation of Learning and Teaching (SELT) surveys provides necessary information to improve the unit for the next student cohort. Yet formative feedback, enabled through the ACU Unitpulse tool, allows lecturers to make more timely adjustments to the unit/teaching during a study period.

Some features of the ACU Unitpulse tool are listed below:

• It is fully integrated with LEO, ACU’s Learning Management System.
• Lecturers can post four types of questions to students, including Likert scale, rating type and text options.
• Anonymous reporting - students can be assured that their names will not be identified when giving feedback.
• Lecturers have the option of sharing some question results with students.
• One-on-one communication between a lecturer and a student, even though the tool does not reveal any details of students.
• An open communication channel for the learning scenarios at ACU (traditional, online and blended units).
• Students and lecturers can download an app for this tool to their smartphones making it easier to post and respond to questions (the app is called Bluepulse, the commercial name for the product).
• Instructor’s Report - lecturers can download a report of the activities that have taken place in ACU Unitpulse.
• ACU has a legal agreement with this vendor and the data storage is compliant with the Australian Privacy Act.

Lecturers in Charge interested in using the tool are asked to complete the ACU Unitpulse staff access form.  For further information on the tool, see the Learning and Teaching webpage or contact LTC Evaluations.