How to Incorporate Student Feedback in LearnDash?

Meaningful feedback is invaluable in e-learning, as it spurs all course takers and creators to perform better than ever. It is one of the best ways of assessing whether your efforts have been up to the mark and identifying the areas where due improvement is required.

This is as true for course authors as it is for students. We are all aware of how useful instructor feedback is to improve student performance. However, sometimes we tend to underestimate the impact student feedback, i.e. the feedback given by students about the course they have enrolled into, can have in improving the quality of the course.

The Advantages of Student Feedback in E-Learning

There are several advantages of incorporating student feedback in e-learning. Let us have a look at some of these:

• Student Feedback improves course relevance

Genuine feedback from the students who have enrolled in your course is a great way of finding out whether your material is as relevant as you think it is. This is especially useful in financial, technological, scientific sectors of where dynamic changes are taking place at the drop of a hat. The feedback also gives you a clearer idea of what the student expects from the course and whether these expectations have been met throughout its duration.

• Student Feedback can generate new ideas for Courses

If you look beyond the criticism, student feedback, both positive and negative, can be a source of ideas for improving your existing courses and creating new ones. The reactions of your students offer you a direct insight into their requirements and can help you identify exactly what is it that they are looking for, which you can incorporate into your courses accordingly.

• Course evaluation is important to understand Instructor capability

There is nothing better than a no-holds-barred review to gauge the capabilities of your instructors. This is important if you have a course marketplace where you are hosting multiple authors with their independent courses or in scenarios like a university/K-12 website, where your staff is conducting online lectures.

Student feedback can be instrumental in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of every instructor and take the appropriate measures to ensure that an optimum output level is reached.

• Action on Feedback improves Recommendations

This is more of a cause-effect case. At first glance, it might seem like there is no connection between feedback and recommendations but think again. From a student’s perspective, if he/she has given some feedback on a course and he/she sees the course author making an effort to implement those changes, they are obviously going to be pleased.

Knowing that their suggestions are being taken into account, thought over, and being incorporated, creates a sense of loyalty within the student and increases the chances of him/her returning and recommending your course to their friends as well!

Sounds pretty useful, huh? Unfortunately, LearnDash does not have a default functionality to integrate course feedback into your e-learning website.

You can add WordPress-based review and feedback add-ons to your course, but the major drawback is that they do not let you control who reviews your courses or sends feedback. For instance, a person who has just enrolled in your course can review or rate it without even having begun with the lessons yet. Similarly, there is no way to track if the person sending feedback has actually completed the course or has simply added his/her opinion. This makes it difficult to extract genuine feedback from all the spam.

Incorporating Student Feedback into LearnDash

To overcome the difficulty of phony feedback, you can use a native LearnDash extension like Ratings, Reviews, and Feedback for LearnDash, which integrates seamlessly with the core plugin.

The Ratings, Reviews, and Feedback extension is built for LearnDash and works so that you have complete control over who can rate/review your course and who can send feedback for it. Some of the plugins features include:

• Regulated addition of feedback after a particular lesson/topic/quiz is complete
• Restriction of feedback addition unless the entire course is complete
• Selection of particular courses for which feedback can be added
• Optional settings for auto-send of course feedback to the course Author
• Selective display of ratings and reviews for the course
• Star-based rating system for all courses
• Option to reject a student’s course review and rating
• Multiple templates for feedback form, customizable as necessary
• Upvoting of reviews supported
• Comments on reviews at the front-end to allow corroboration and correction

The Final Word

Integrating student feedback can be immensely helpful in improving the quality of your course. In addition, it encourages transparency amongst your instructors and students, which in turn attests to the professionalism and effectiveness of your courses.

When it comes to a LearnDash website, the Ratings, Reviews, and Feedback extension is one of the best ways of incorporating these advantages.

What do you think? Would you recommend any other way to incorporate student feedback in LearnDash? Drop a comment to let us know!