eLearning Experts / Evidence

Ask learners the question that gets an answer

Satisfaction surveys measure politeness.

End-of-course satisfaction surveys reliably produce good scores and little information, because they are completed by people who finished, at the moment of finishing, and the questions invite agreement.

Questions with more signal are specific and behavioural. Where did you get stuck. What did you skip. What would you tell a colleague to do differently. Did you use anything from this in the following month. The last is the only one that bears on whether the course worked and it requires asking later.

The people worth asking are the ones who did not finish, and they are the hardest to reach and never surveyed. A short message to a sample of them, asking only where they stopped and why, produces more actionable material than any number of completion surveys.

Whatever is collected should visibly change something, or collection stops being worth the learner's time. A course that publishes what changed in response to feedback gets better feedback in the next round.

The other group worth asking is people who completed quickly and scored well, because they can identify what was unnecessary. Learners who struggled identify what was hard; learners who found it easy identify what was padding, and courses accumulate padding faster than they accumulate difficulty.