Automating student survey reports in online education for faculty and instructional designers

In this paper, we discuss Colorado State University Online's progress toward designing automated survey reports for student feedback data collected through our newly designed LTI survey tool. Using multiple R packages, including 'rmarkdown' and 'likert', the reporting tool imports student survey response data and generates reports for faculty and instructional designers. These reports focus on student perceptions of communication, course design, academic challenge, general satisfaction, and more. These reports display visual representations of the Likert-type response frequencies, basic descriptive statistics, and free-response comments. Surveys are administered just before half-way through the semester to provide formative feedback and just before the end of the semester to provide summative feedback. In this way, faculty and instructional designers can obtain a quick and easily digestible report to make changes and improvements to their classes with minimal effort in the back end production.