QAA shares Caspian's VLE student feedback pilot

Updated Sep 10, 2026

QAA published an account of Caspian School of Academics' VLE student feedback pilot on 2 September 2026. Dr Dom Conroy's blog describes surveys, student discussions and engagement data. For quality teams reviewing a virtual learning environment, it offers a prompt to ask which questions each evidence source can answer.

What the VLE student feedback pilot describes

Conroy, Caspian's Quality Manager, describes a limited audit within a VLE refresh. Students wanted more classroom use of the VLE, reported navigation uncertainty and described limited use of the digital library.

The blog gives no sample size, survey wording or fieldwork dates. This is a local exploratory account, without a measured before-and-after comparison. It does not establish how widely the reported experiences apply.

What this means for institutions

Our recommendation is to start a VLE review with a task students need to complete. Ask them to explain how they locate assessment guidance, prepare for a seminar or find help. Invite accounts of what worked as well as where they became stuck. Keep an open question for problems the review team has not anticipated, and check whether the invitation reaches students who rarely use the platform.

Give different evidence sources distinct roles. Use activity records to describe recorded interactions, student accounts to explore experience, and direct testing to investigate a reported obstacle. Do not infer a student's reason for avoiding a resource from a low access count alone. For a comparison with testing before launch, read our SOAS online-learning account.

Agree how the review will lead to decisions. Assign reported issues to the relevant teaching, library, digital-learning or quality team, then record the proposed response and a review date. Ask students to try the revised task and describe any remaining difficulty. Report what changed and what still needs work, keeping that response separate from the original findings.

How student feedback analysis connects

For a similar review, we suggest coding comments by the task, the difficulty described and any requested change. Keep survey responses distinguishable from discussion notes, and preserve disagreements. A theme such as difficulty finding assessment guidance should lead reviewers back to the relevant accounts before they decide whether to change navigation, wording or teaching practice. Treat these as possible responses to investigate.

Before combining material, agree what can be accessed and reported. Our student comment analysis governance checklist provides prompts on category definitions, coverage, human review and reporting caveats. Use those prompts to document how the analysis was produced. Do not present comment frequency as a population estimate without examining recruitment and response coverage.

FAQ

Q: What should a university reviewing its VLE do now?

A: Choose a student task, agree what a successful experience would look like and invite students to describe how it works in practice. Record who contributed, the collection method and what the findings cannot establish. Assign responsibility for investigating each proposed change.

Q: What are the timeline and scope of this development?

A: The blog was published on 2 September 2026 and concerns Caspian. It sets no sector deadline or new national survey requirement.

Q: How should teams judge whether student feedback has made a difference?

A: Keep a record linking the reported problem, the decision and the follow-up check. Ask whether students can complete the task more clearly after the change. Compare like-for-like evidence where possible, and acknowledge differences in participants or teaching context before attributing an improvement to the redesign.

References

[QAA]: "Looking at VLEs through students' eyes" Published: 2026-09-02