Introduction

The course feedback questionnaire applied at the University of Tartu from the spring semester of 2019 is primarily meant for the teaching staff for the development of their courses. The questionnaire enables them to get feedback on the students’ learning experience during the whole course. When the course is taught by several lecturers, the essential role belongs to the lecturer in charge, who can use the information for developing the course as a whole.

The structure of the questionnaire, its statements, and questions are based on the studies of teaching and learning in higher education. The answers enable to understand how the learning environment of the course supported learning and what the learners’ contribution was. The latter is inevitable for learning to happen.

Course feedback questionnaire is one of the ways for collecting information for developing the course. Lecturers can use different methods for collecting information about teaching [3] [5]. For example, they can ask for students’ feedback during the teaching process to react quickly if changes are needed.

The aim of this guide is to support lecturers in interpreting the information collected by the course feedback questionnaire, and developing their courses on this basis. This guide is based on the information collected during testing of the course feedback questionnaire and the results of the content analysis of responses to open-ended questions for high and low engagement courses (conducted by academic developers in spring 2020. The idea of the guide was inspired by a similar manual of the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology [4].

The information received by means of the new course feedback questionnaire in the spring and autumn semesters of 2019 were analysed in more detail, and the results were published in an article, which is available in both Estonian and English.