Online Course Evaluation Surveys: 3 Smart Ways To Get Feedback [+1 Template]

Did you know that 89% of consumers around the world read reviews before purchasing products and that 79% of buyers rely on online reviews as much as personal recommendations? Undoubtedly, consumer feedback plays a crucial role in the sales process!

Feedback is essential to moving your business forward. Besides, it can open up a very valuable dialogue with your students. Especially if you can receive constructive feedback from your learners, then you can use it to improve your digital products as an elearning business. You can improve your course design, your course structure, and ultimately provide an enhanced learning experience.

Collect feedback to reveal hidden gems from your learners regarding their student learning and your instructional materials. Use this course feedback to discover opportunities to optimize your online school by creating a new course idea, adding valuable testimonials to your landing pages, and unveiling business opportunities to further grow your elearning business.

So, in the quest for getting honest feedback from your students, first, ask yourself the following:

• Is there any part of your course/school/academy that you would like to improve?
• Which channel works for you best for communicating with your students?
• What do you plan to do with the data/information that you will receive?

These three questions should help you come up with the most appropriate ways and actions to approach your learners.

There are hundreds of ways to put in action to get useful feedback; there are even more factors to consider when creating feedback surveys, course evaluation questions, feedback quizzes, and survey questions.

In this blog post, we simplify the process for you and show you three smart ways to collect the right feedback. We go through the process of creating an online course evaluation survey and as a bonus, we present you with a ready-to-use template and a list of modern online tools you can use to get feedback with optimized response rates.

But first, are you planning on creating an online course? Keep in mind that LearnWorlds is one of the top online course LMS platforms with all the tools to create, market, and sell online courses or deliver top-notch training to your customers and employees. You can try LearnWorlds with a 30-day free trial!

1. Create In-Course Surveys

The best time to ask for feedback is when the student is already engaged in your course. You can have feedback forms in several sections of your course to get feedback along the way or a final course evaluation at the end of the course.

Forms can be embedded as learning units at the end of your course or as external links that open inside your course.

This is the most straightforward way of getting your students to evaluate the content, your teaching methods, and the overall experience.

2. Email Your Learners

One of the most efficient ways to reach out to your learners is to email them. After all, email boasts a great average open rate of over 23% in the education and training industry.

In our most recent email sequences article, you can find an email example of a product review email you can customize to ask for feedback.

Try to personalize the email subject to increase the chances your email is being opened. Be specific about what you are saying and go straight to the point so that your students voluntarily choose to open your email and respond.

Email Subject Headline Examples:

• “Take our short survey – 5 minutes” instead of “Feedback Reminder”
• “We would like to hear from you” instead of “Give us your feedback”
• “What did you think of the course?” instead of “Tell us what you think”

Getting the email subject headline right means that you are setting up the scene effectively and your students immediately know what is expected of them.

Keep in mind also to:

• Start out friendly, addressing your learners with their names
• Explain yourself, why are you sending the email
• Clearly state what you need from them
• Say “thank you”

3. Conduct Personal Interviews

A 1:1 interview is perfectly acceptable to obtain feedback from customers. In fact, some of your students may prefer it. You can dedicate anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour to speaking with them and answering their basic questions about how to use your course, which shows that you care about them. Most people appreciate that.

You can select a number of your most representative learners to conduct 1:1 interviews if your student database is large.

Likewise, asking your students their opinion on how things could improve is going the extra mile. If you come to think about it, you are doing this for them. You are taking the time to understand them so that you become able to offer a more personalized solution that works along with their learning needs.

Personal interviews can reveal a great deal of insightful information when you are asking the right questions. Boast, a widely popular platform for requesting, collecting, managing, and sharing customer feedback, has recently released an extensive list of feedback questions to address every part of your business, from customer service to market research.

Depending on your online school’s needs, you can take what you need from the list. Once you prepare your questionnaire, send your customers a personal invite and schedule the date, the time and the place – either offline or online – to talk to them. Also, find which way they prefer, as you can offer phone interviews using landline phone service providers or conducting interviews via conferencing apps.

Make sure you clarify the subject matter of the interview so that your customers will know exactly what to expect. Keep in mind that if you run an e-learning business with third-party trainers, you can also collect your instructors feedback about your course material and even their student experience.

4. How to Create a Course Evaluation Template

Creating a good and unbiased survey has a lot to do with the design (structure) and the questions that you include in it.

Here are some useful guidelines you need to pay extra attention to when creating an online course evaluation:

• Ask mostly open-ended questions – closed-ended questions (e.g. yes/no questions, ratings, and multiple choice) should be used with caution. Open-ended questions are probing and can give more useful insight into a matter.
• Example of an open-ended question: “If you could change one thing about the way this online course is laid out, what would you change?”
• Avoid the use of jargon, slang, or acronyms – make sure you are being understood easily, use clear and simple language in your instructions.
• Use straightforward, self-contained specific questions – that only ask one question and do not lead students to already made-up conclusions and assumptions.
• Avoid useless questions – only ask questions that fulfill your end goal.
• Have consistency in rating questions and instructions – give out plenty of options to choose from.
• For example, use a 1 to 5 scale, and clarify that 1 refers to ‘Strongly Disagree’ and 5 to ‘Strongly Agree’
• Design the survey in a way so that it represents your brand effectively – use your logo and branding colors.
• Close the survey thanking your students – encourage them to take further action on your website or offer them a freebie, a supplementary gift, or a discount.

Taking these factors into account can help come up with an all-inclusive survey that gets you the answers you need.

Example of a Course Evaluation Survey Template

We have prepared a sample survey that you can use to evaluate your course and get constructive feedback from students.

You can remove the questions that are irrelevant for your course/academy and add your own where needed.

Informational questions

Information you might need to ask from your students.

• Name of the Course
• Instructor
• Name of Participant
• Year / Date

Teaching-related questions – Likert scale

You can use a Likert Scale from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree”

• The course stimulated my interest in the subject.
• The course encouraged discussion and responded to questions.
• The instructor demonstrated in-depth knowledge of the subject.
• The instructor appeared enthusiastic and interested.
• The course used a variety of instructional methods to reach the course objectives (e.g. group discussions, student presentations, etc.).
• The course challenged students to do their best work.
• The information in the course was easily understandable.
• The instructor was accessible outside of class.
• I found the course engaging.
• I found the course interesting.

Teaching-related questions – Open-ended

• What do you think about the teaching method?
• Would you add/remove something from the teaching method?

Assessment-related questions – Likert scale

You can use a Likert Scale from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree”

• The course included sufficient assessment methods
• The course provided sufficient feedback
• Feedback showed how to improve my work
• Exams/assessments were related to the course learning outcomes.
• I found the course easy.
• I found the course hard.

Assessment-related questions – Open-ended

• Was the feedback enough? Please explain.
• Would you have liked a different way to get feedback? Please explain.
• Would you have liked a different way to be assessed? Please explain.

Overall experience-related questions – Likert scale

You can use a Likert Scale from “Excellent” to “Poor”

• Overall, how do you rate your experience in this course?
• I would recommend this course to a friend/colleague

Overall experience-related questions – Open-ended

• What changes would you recommend to improve this course?
• What did you like best about your instructors teaching?
• What did you like least about your instructor’s teaching?

Student Self-Evaluation-related questions – Likert scale

You can use a Likert Scale from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree”

• I feel that I am achieving the learning outcomes.
• I am satisfied with this course.

Miscellaneous questions – Yes or No

• The syllabus was explained at the beginning of the course.
• The course was delivered as outlined in the syllabus.
• The instructor explained the grading criteria of the course.

Miscellaneous questions – Open-ended

• Do you feel this course has changed your life in any way? If yes, how (please give examples)?
• How did/will you use this course?
• Why did you choose this course?
• Do you have any other comments/feedback for this course?
• Would you like to share any thoughts with the instructor(s)?

The above questions were inspired by Survey Monkey & 123formbuilder. Walk the extra mile and take a look at their course evaluation survey templates to get some ideas on how to better structure your survey.

5. Copy our Course Evaluation Survey

Using the above questions, we have created a Google Form survey you can easily copy and customize to share with your students. Simply click on the button below, then copy and you can have a pre-made course evaluation survey to use.

Instructions on copying our course evaluation survey
What you are copying is the Google Spreadsheet for the responses along with the Google Form in your drive. If you are redirected to a spreadsheet file after copying, you can click on the “Form” menu item and then “edit form” to see and edit the form.

You can edit or customize the survey first, and then embed it inside your course or send it by email to get responses.

6. Best Tools to Collect the Answers

There are many handy tools to choose from to collect and manage your answers. All you need is an online form that you can also embed inside a course. Here is a list of some of the tools we suggest:

Google Forms: perhaps the most popular and easiest tool to use when it comes to creating surveys. Use it to create beautiful colored and themed-based surveys of any type, have your progress saved automatically, or add collaborators to help you out. Google Forms is free to use, has no restrictions on the number of surveys or questions you can create. Also, it allows you to collect online survey responses and embed your surveys into emails.

ReportR: with this handy tool from Survey Anyplace, you can collect the answers from your survey evaluation in an automated PDF report. This report doesn’t only collect the answers, it also allows you to receive distinct recommendations for each different course, based on the answers the respondent gave. This can be done per respondent, but you can also extract a report showing the results altogether, from every respondent who’s taken the survey so far. This enables you to link a report to every course, and re-evaluate what could be improved in order to offer your students the educational value they are looking for.

Typeform: an excellent option that offers custom designing options and allows you to create different varieties of questionnaires, including multiple-choice, dropping lists, picture choice, ratings, and many more. Typeform’s free version offers an unlimited amount of surveys and questions but only up to 100 responses each time.

SurveyMonkey: another popular solution that offers a free version in which you can create unlimited surveys with up to 10 questions and 100 survey responses. SurveyMonkey is ideal for small-audience and short surveys but for more in-depth ones, you might want to consider upgrading to premium access.

123formbuilder: this is a more robust solution to create custom forms. It has an easy drag-and-drop editor that enables you to create any kind of feedback form. You can use the free plan for up to 5 forms of 10 questions and 100 survey responses.

Jotform: with its drag-and-drop survey maker, easy customization, and Form Analytics, Jotform has all the survey and reporting tools to collect, evaluate and track helpful data. Its conditional logic and calculation features, give you the option to build an interactive survey. You can personalize questions based on answers, and automatically make calculations. Users can also save and continue their progress later, so you don’t have to worry that they won’t finish your surveys because they’re too long.

7. Putting the Feedback to Good Use

Gathering feedback isn’t the end of the journey. Once you have collected it, you need to come up with the best ways to use it so that it better suits the needs of your online school – and of course, of your students.

Utilizing mixed methods research techniques, you can analyze the feedback data to identify trends, patterns, and specific areas of improvement within your online school, enabling you to make informed decisions and tailor your educational offerings to better meet the unique needs and preferences of your students.

So, what can you do with it?

Improve Your Course

Taking your customers’ responses into account can help you improve how you do things. For example, it may help you discover a better way to communicate with your students or take an entirely different approach in terms of branding your school.

Alternatively, it can help you become more cautious in creating courses so that you add, change or remove those parts that do not work for your students.

On that note, you can also improve your course by adding more learning activities. Whether it’s an extra coaching session, written transcripts, a community feel-like environment, a course certificate, an informative webinar, or a podcast, you can add additional value to your course.

Find a new course topic

You never know when a brilliant idea reaches your human inbox – your brain. That’s why it’s important to make sure that you are always on the safe side, and it’s true – your students’ feedback can save you from lots of brainstorming sessions, and help you find a new course topic.

Customer feedback can help you identify what’s missing from your school’s main course catalog. Perhaps it’s a topic that you haven’t got time to touch upon, have been neglecting, or worse, ignoring.

With customer feedback, you can discover what your students need the most and come up with a subject course to teach that is high on demand and that your learners will like.

Connect more with your students

The most satisfying part in the process of getting feedback is being able to talk directly with your students about things that matter to them. When this happens, in a way, you are allowing them to shine, to openly share their opinions, and have their say.

By gathering feedback you are letting them know that their voice is heard and that they are valuable to you. In return, this builds on loyalty, increases student satisfaction and overall happiness.

And a happy online learning community can never go wrong!

Use feedback as a testimonial

Did you know that your student feedback can work as a reliable source of information for potential customers? As we mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, 79% of buyers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. For your online school business, this is more than ideal. It’s awesome.

Operating effectively in the digital world means that you need to build on the important factors of credibility and trust so that you constantly spread out the good news and boast about your services.

Now, to use a product review as an online testimonial, first check with your students whether it would be OK to share their opinion and personal story/experience for others to see online.

Ideally, you want to use a testimonial that’s well written, preferably with metaphors, similes, and other figures of speech. It also needs to show your course in a very good light, remember you’re looking for praise from your student feedback if you’re hoping to use it as a testimonial. You can also consider using feedback that is mostly positive but gives constructive criticism to make your testimonials look more realistic. The most important thing of course is to have your student’s permission.

Once you get the permission, read our following guidelines to learn how to embed a survey on your LearnWorlds school’s site.

How to Embed a Survey/Feedback Form

You can embed a course evaluation form after the final exam or certificate of your course, and start getting valuable feedback.

This is an example feedback form created with Google Forms

Getting feedback aims to improve your way of thinking – and working, as an online instructor. It’s gathered to help you start making more informed decisions about how your school functions or better yet – how it should function, helping you improve your course and increasing the value it offers to your students.

From what it looks like, asking your students for feedback is the way forward! Now, would you consider giving it a try?

Kyriaki Raouna

Content Creator at LearnWorlds

Kyriaki is a Content Creator for the LearnWorlds team writing about marketing and e-learning, helping course creators on their journey to create, market, and sell their online courses. Equipped with a degree in Career Guidance, she has a strong background in education management and career success. In her free time, she gets crafty and musical.