One of the three priorities for the HETA project is to progress technology and analytics for extracting information and insight from student comments obtained from feedback surveys. In general, the “quantitative and categorical data” and the “free text comments” from student surveys are analysed independently. The first often in terms of aggregate statistics and the later simply read by interested parties. A joint analysis that merges the quantitative (scale-from-one-to-five type) responses and the richer specific information in the associated open-ended text responses allows a more powerful and nuanced extraction of information.
As a first step toward this more integrated approach, we have developed an online navigation tool for comments from the UTS Student Feedback Survey. This tool joins together, for the first time at UTS, the quantitative and free-text responses and provides an assortment of filtering and navigation utilities. This tool brings together the last 4 years of student feedback on their experience in individual subjects and contains a total of over a quarter-of-a-million written student comments.
