Following on from the release of the YAPC::Europe 2008 Survey, I'm pleased to have just launched a companion set of surveys for the Master Class tutorials. Although the Course Assessment Form is perhaps not as verbose as the main survey, I've collated several ideas from other assessment forms to get a brief idea of what attendees thought of the course, to allow them to make suggestions for improvement, and to highlight what they thought was good about the course.
With currently over 60% of responses in from those polled on the main survey, I'm hoping that a good proportion, if not all, will respond to the feedback for the individual courses. The results will be collated and sent to the presenters once all their attendees have responded, or just after October 30th (the closing date). This is essentially a trial, as suggested by Dave Cross, to enable the tutorial presenters to get some form of feedback on the courses they presented before and after YAPC::Europe in Copenhagen.
It has also been suggested that each regular talk should have a similar feedback mechanism. However, whereas the tutorials required a signup, so we have their exact attendees, the regular talk sessions are a little more ad-hoc. It could be opened up as a free-for-all to enter what they like about a particular talk, but there is no guarantee that the respondent saw the talk. Having said that, several of the respondents have chosen not to rate the talks in the main survey, so it's likely to improve feedback for the presenter at the very least.
My intention was to roll this into ACT, but for the YAPC::Europe surveys at least, I'm not so sure that it needs to be. Having the survey independent of the ACT system (although I do use the attendee lists from ACT), and the fact that one person (me) is currently controlling access to that data to ensure anonymity, may actually be providing a degree of confidence in the privacy of comments, etc. I'll have to see what the Lisbon guys want to do, but I'll be happy to provide the same setup (if not more extensive) for the surveys next year.
Thanks for setting up a survey, but I already have one. I don't advertise it because only the students who attended needed to know about it.
I've set up the normal survey that Stonehenge uses for its classes and sent it to the students in the Stonehenge master classes. I'll share the data with the instructors and the organizers.
Students should get an email from their instructor, and if not can email me directly.
Re:Rating of talks
barbie on 2008-08-29T17:49:17
When the idea was raised a while ago to add some talk ratings, I wasn't sure how best to approach it. I agree that a better feedback mechanism is missing from the main survey, however, after Dave Cross asked me to implement something for the Tutorials, I put together something fairly simple where you can feed back. As there were only 4 tutorials, this wasn't too difficult, however the solution I used will work with the regular talks too.
Next year, I hope to have something better for each talk appraisal, so you can feed back exactly why you thought a particular aspect of a talk didn't quite work. Consider the current section in the main survey an experiment. One that has largely worked, but has also been a good springboard to improve it further
:) There have been some people who have chosen to only rate a small selection of talks, and a few who didn't want to rate any talks, so you're not alone
;)
