SUFAT - An Analytics Tool for Gaining Insights from Student Feedback Comments

Abstract

Teacher evaluation is a vital element in improving student learning outcomes. Course and instructor feedback given by students, provides insights that can help improve student learning outcomes and teaching quality. Teaching and course evaluation systems help to collect quantitative and qualitative feedback from students. Since manually analysing the qualitative feedback is painstaking and a tedious process, usually, only the quantitative feedback is often used for evaluating the course and the instructor. However, useful knowledge is hidden in the qualitative comments, in the form of sentiments and suggestions that can provide valuable insights to help plan improvements in the course content and delivery. In order to efficiently gather, analyse and provide deeper insights from student feedback by topics, we developed a user-friendly application, Student Feedback Analysis Tool (SUFAT). The tool is an independent desktop application that can be installed and used by any nontechnical user. The tool takes an excel sheet with comments as an input and generates an excel sheet with visual reports of summaries that include sentiments and suggestions as an output. The tool can benefit instructors to quickly analyse the termly qualitative feedback and take appropriate actions. We intend to release the tool for public use so that instructors can download and install the tool on their computer system.