A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

204 ❘
Teaching, supervising, learning
Questionnaires can also have their downsides. Overenthusiastic canvassing of student
opinion in some universities has led to ‘questionnaire fatigue’, while among staff there
has been a growing awareness of the considerable time and expertise needed, not only
to design questionnaires which are salient and to the point, but also to process and analyse
the resulting data. Happily, there is a growing range of alternative approaches to
gathering feedback (e.g. Harvey, 1998; Morss and Murray, 2005; Kahn and Walsh, 2006).
These include:
• ‘instant’ questionnaires, ‘one-minute’ papers (Stead, 2005) and pro formas, many of
which side-step questionnaire fatigue by combining brevity with opportunities for
student comment;
• focus groups, student panels and structured group discussion, which can offer
students more informal and relatively open-ended ways of pooling thoughts and
reactions;
• web-based discussion boards on which students post their comments and queries
for open display.