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Peer Feedback
Sciences
Project
In this course, the teacher regularly solicits students through satisfaction questionnaires to ensure the interest and relevance of the content, allowing him to adapt the course according to the comments received and to improve the learning experience.
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Initial situation
This course is intended for PhD students of the Faculty of Physics. Previously developed jointly with the University of Lausanne, from now on, the proposed courses are organized within the Department of Nuclear and Corpuscular Physics of the University of Geneva. Because of this new organization, the teacher in charge of this course wanted to make sure that the content provided corresponded to the students’ expectations. Because of the limited number of students, he could not have access to the institutional evaluations and therefore set up satisfaction questionnaires himself.
Project implementation
The objective of this course, presented in a form approaching a research colloquium, is to provide an overview of the teacher’s research topics. It addresses the subject of particle detectors, in particular semiconductor detectors, with particular attention to recent developments in detector technology with applications to high energy and medical physics. For doctoral students, this topic is not always related to the theme of their thesis. The goal is not to offer a course that is too specialized, but to complete the training of doctoral students from an experimental point of view.
Because of the heterogeneity of the audience, the teacher’s concern is to interest all the participants, regardless of the theme of their thesis. In order to ensure the relevance of the content he proposes and the dynamics of his course, he invites, without obligation, the students to answer a short questionnaire after each session.
The questions focus on what they were interested in, what they were less interested in, what they missed, what they would like to learn more about or not. The answers and comments obtained allow the teacher to question the proposed content and to adapt the next course according to the requests made. If all the comments cannot always be taken into account within the time frame of the next course, they serve to improve and shape the proposed course in subsequent years.
Thoughts and advice
The teacher emphasized that this questionnaire format is very useful for a course with few students who cannot benefit from institutional evaluations. It allows for direct access to student comments after each course and for refocusing or clarifying certain points during subsequent courses based on the feedback received.
