Dear all,

 

The University I work for is currently in discussions with the Students’ Union and the UCU about current practises for releasing data collected via our annual Student Modular Feedback Questionnaire.

 

In short, the SU want full access to the data to help them evaluate the performance of the University, whereas the UCU are unhappy with it being in the public domain as they consider it to be personal data. The format of the questionnaire is such that students are asked to rate the quality of the module as well as evaluate the lecturer who taught the module. This is done both through use of Optical Mark Recognition as well as through free text ‘comment’.

 

The current University code of practise relating to the handling of this data states that any feedback containing offensive comments will be destroyed and will not form part of the statistical survey. Once compiled, quantitative feedback will then be fed back to the appropriate Staff/Student Committee. This stops short of providing full access, and in particular qualitative feedback.  

 

I’m assuming that most HEI’s conduct internal student feedback surveys of one kind or another, and I would be grateful if colleagues could provide me with an insight as to how you currently handle the data once it has been collected? Do you allow your student body (or their representatives) access to this data, and if so, what restrictions do you have in place taking into account the provisions of the Data Protection Act? The SU have indicated that they are considering requesting complete data via the FOI Act, and again, I was wondering if other HEIs had received similar requests, and if so, how they dealt with them?

 

We have our own thoughts about what we can and can’t share with the student body, however, it would be useful if we could establish any principles of good practise across the sector, which we can then hopefully use to move this issue forward.

 

Any input on the above would be gratefully received.


Many thanks in advance,

 

Mark

 

Mark Lister

Administrative Officer (Student Office)

Loughborough University

 

Tel: 01509 223746

 

 

All archives of messages are stored permanently and are available to the world wide web community at large at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/data-protection.html

Selected commands (the command has been filled in below in the body of the email if you are receiving emails in HTML format):

All user commands can be found at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/help/commandref.htm and are sent in the body of an otherwise blank email to [log in to unmask]

Any queries about sending or receiving messages please send to the list owner [log in to unmask]

(Please send all commands to [log in to unmask] not the list or the moderators, and all requests for technical help to [log in to unmask], the general office helpline)