One great challenge of teaching is knowing how you are doing. In a physical classroom with your students, you might be able to assess that from how many people are paying attention by asking a question mid-class and seeing if your students are following along. While that's useful, sometimes students are uncomfortable talking to you or in front of other students. In asynchronous courses, of course, there’s no immediate way to get this type of feedback.

One solution is to utilize some kind of survey tool to solicit feedback from your students. Your LMS may include such a feature, as D2L Brightspace does, or you may need to use some third-party tool like SurveyMonkey, for example.

I’ve used this survey tool to develop a relatively simple Exit Ticket that asks just a couple of short questions for students to provide feedback. The first question asks students which learning activities are working for them in understanding the content. The second question asks students to anonymously indicate if there is something that still doesn’t make sense to them after working through the learning module.

The use of exit tickets is discussed in the academic literature in relation to increasing student engagement and faculty insight into effective teaching strategies (Matematik, 2024; Danley, 2006)

Getting this feedback is helpful. The problem is that you may feel overwhelmed by the amount of feedback received this way. Consider what would happen if you had 100 students and you solicited feedback weekly: by the time you get halfway into the semester, you likely will have hundreds of responses from your students.

One of the things that you could do is take this material and ask Chat to summarize it into an actionable list of items you can address. With that list, you can also ask Chat for ideas on how to tackle issues identified by students. For example, my students often struggle with the dormant commerce clause because it doesn't make any sense. It's not literally in the Constitution but is instead a court interpretation of the commerce clause that requires that clause to also limit state action. Perhaps Chat could help to generate some graphics I could use to explain this concept in a different way, or an activity that I could implement in a class meeting to practice with this concept.

You may also use the discussion board as an activity, as I do, in your asynchronous courses. This is another place where you are potentially soliciting student feedback on the course or their understanding of a particular concept or learning objective. You could use Chat to help summarize student responses to your discussion board, and look for common misunderstandings that would present an opportunity for follow-up.

Your institution may also have its own course survey process where you get electronic comments from students on how the course went, which can also be a lot of feedback to review. Chat can also help to summarize this information and perhaps provide you with ideas for addressing student concerns from the course.

Putting all of this information together with Chat can help you to get a global view on how students are understanding the course content, presenting an opportunity to make changes in the course.

Danley, A. et al. (2006). "Exit Tickets Open the Door to University Learning." InSight : A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, 11 (2006): 48-58. https://doi.org/10.46504/11201603da.

Matematika, I. et al. (2024). "Implementation of Self-Evaluation Exit Tickets in Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs) in Online Learning." INOMATIKA (2024). https://doi.org/10.35438/inomatika.v6i2.459.