Student engagement is a key driver of positive academic outcomes, but measuring and improving engagement is a continuum. Collecting input from students about their experiences and using it to enhance teaching and services is an established process. However, gathering meaningful student feedback is often easier said than done. It must be collected at the right time (when experiences are fresh) and in the right context to be useful. Even then, collecting feedback alone doesn’t accomplish much, the real impact comes from closing the loop, i.e. analyzing the feedback and acting on it to drive continuous improvement. In short, feedback should feed into action, creating a virtuous cycle where we listen to students, make improvements, and in turn improve student engagement and success.
Why Student Feedback Matters
Student feedback plays a critical role in shaping educational quality and student success. When institutions actively listen to students and respond to their concerns, it shows learners that their voice is valued which, in turn, can boost student satisfaction, engagement, and even advocacy. Feedback data is also crucial for administrative decision-making. Across higher education, survey results inform decisions about course design, teaching practices, and program improvements. For example, end-of-course evaluations let instructors gauge whether they met their teaching goals and adjust future course content or methods to better meet student expectations .
In addition, student surveys can illuminate factors affecting engagement beyond the classroom. Feedback can reveal how motivated or supported students feel in their learning environment , or highlight pain points in campus life. A regular cadence of surveys enables “an ongoing commitment to gathering student feedback, analyzing the data and coming up with a set of responsive points for action,” which research shows improves the overall functioning of the educational system. In other words, closing the feedback loop by not only collecting input but acting on it and communicating those actions back gives real meaning to the exercise of conducting student surveys. Without that follow-through, students may feel their feedback “does not matter”, but when they see changes (big or small) resulting from their input, it builds trust and engagement. Effective feedback processes help transform student voice into tangible improvements in the academic experience.
Common Student Feedback Use Cases
To tap into the benefits of feedback, universities and colleges run surveys for many aspects of the student journey. For a comprehensive view, schools deploy feedback tools across different domains of student life – from the classroom to campus services – to uncover improvement opportunities . Common student survey use cases include:
Course Completion Surveys: Gather feedback at the end of a course about the content, instruction quality, and overall learning experience. These surveys help instructors and departments understand what worked well and what could be improved in the course design or teaching approach .
First-Year Experience Surveys: Check in with first-year students about their transition to college life. Feedback on orientation, advising, and academic support in the first year can highlight opportunities to better acclimate new students and boost retention.
Campus Facilities and Services Surveys: Evaluate student satisfaction with facilities (dorms, library, labs, etc.) and services (dining, IT support, counseling, etc.). This feedback helps campus administrators improve the quality of the environment in which students live and learn.
Career Services and Internship Surveys: Collect input from students on the usefulness of career counseling, job fairs, and internship programs. The results can guide enhancements in career services to better prepare students for the workforce.
Engagement and Involvement Surveys: Measure how connected students feel to campus life outside of academics – for instance, through clubs, extracurricular activities, and campus events. Strong social and extracurricular engagement is linked to higher student satisfaction and success.
Graduating Student Exit Surveys: Gather reflections from graduating students on their overall academic journey, the support they received, and their post-graduation plans. This feedback can reveal long-term trends in student satisfaction and provide insights for strategic improvements.
Academic Advising Satisfaction Surveys: Ask students if they are getting the guidance they need from academic advisors. Effective advising is crucial to keeping students on track, so feedback here can pinpoint training needs or process changes for advising offices.
Online Learning Experience Surveys: (If applicable) Understand student experiences with online or hybrid courses covering areas like technology, interaction, and learning effectiveness in a virtual environment. This is especially important as digital learning has expanded.
Mental Health and Wellness Surveys: Assess how students perceive the availability and quality of mental health resources, wellness programs, and campus support networks. Student well-being has a direct impact on engagement and academic performance, so feedback in this area helps institutions respond proactively to student needs.
Each of these survey types serves as a listening mechanism. They capture student sentiment at key moments (end of course, end of year, etc.) and on important topics. The ultimate goal is not just to collect data, but to use it improving curricula, campus services, and support systems in response to what students say. By deploying surveys in these use cases, institutions gather a holistic picture of the student experience and identify where to take action.
Technical Challenges in Feedback Collection and Analysis
While the value of student feedback is clear, implementing a robust feedback loop can be difficult due to technical hurdles. Many institutions rely on a patchwork of external survey tools and manual processes, leading to several challenges:
Systems Integration and Data Silos: Student data often lives in enterprise systems like the student information system (SIS) (for example, Workday Student), while surveys might be conducted using third-party platforms (e.g. Qualtrics, Google Forms, SurveyMonkey). Connecting these systems is cumbersome. Universities frequently must build or use integration tools to export student and course data from Workday Student into the survey tool (to target the right recipients) and then import survey responses back into an analytics system. The result of using multiple disparate tools is that data becomes scattered across systems with a lot of duplicate export/import work . This fragmentation means no single source of truth – feedback data sits outside the central student system, making it harder to relate responses to other student information (and easy for context to get lost).
Storage and Reporting Complexity: When feedback is collected in an external system, the raw data is outside of the institution’s primary databases. Institutions often resort to storing survey results in a separate data warehouse or spreadsheets. Compiling and analyzing the feedback then requires additional ETL (extract/transform/load) steps, custom reports, or business intelligence tools. For example, staff might manually export survey results to CSV and then upload them into a reporting tool to generate dashboards. This indirection introduces delays and potential errors. In fact, with standalone survey tools, it’s not uncommon to see a “week-long lag” between when students respond and when the institution can actually derive insights, due to manual data consolidation . Such delays hamper timely decision-making.
Multiple Tools and Manual Effort: A related challenge is the sheer number of tools and steps involved in the feedback process. One system is used to author and distribute the survey, another system (or files) to store the responses, and yet another tool for analysis and visualization. This patchwork demands significant manual coordination – for instance, downloading response files, mapping them to student records, and uploading into analytics software . Not only is this labor-intensive, but each handoff is a point of failure or inconsistency. Important contextual information can slip through the cracks during these transfers (e.g. if a response isn’t clearly linked to a specific course or instructor, the context is lost unless someone manually maps it back later). Overall, the technical complexity of integrating survey workflows with student data systems often acts as a barrier to truly closing the feedback loop.
In summary, traditional approaches using external survey tools face integration headaches, data silo issues, and lots of manual work. These technical obstacles make it harder to get the right data at the right time to the right people for action.
Process Challenges in Closing the Feedback Loop
Beyond technology, there are process and organizational challenges that can prevent student feedback from driving prompt action. Even with great survey data, certain pitfalls can keep the feedback loop from closing effectively:
Timeliness of Action: Speed matters when responding to student feedback. If identifying and addressing issues takes too long, the opportunity to improve a student’s experience in the moment could be missed. Unfortunately, when feedback collection relies on batch processes and separate systems, significant time delays often occur. For example, if a mid-semester survey indicates many students are struggling in a course, the ideal scenario is to intervene before the final exam or course drop deadline. But if it takes weeks to compile the results and escalate the concern, that window may close. Many institutions experience this problem – by the time survey results are imported and analyzed, the term is nearly over. In fact, using disconnected tools with manual data wrangling can introduce lags on the order of a week or more for insights to be available . Such delays blunt the impact of feedback. A faster turnaround (“closing the loop” quickly) is critical so that identified issues can lead to timely support or course corrections.
Data Security and Privacy: Student surveys often solicit candid, sensitive feedback – from critiques of teaching to personal feelings about campus climate or wellness. Handling this data responsibly is paramount. When survey responses are stored outside the institution’s secure systems, it raises concerns about data privacy and access control. Reimplementing robust security (like role-based access, FERPA compliance, anonymization where needed, etc.) in a third-party tool can be complicated and might not match the institution’s standards. There is risk in having student feedback “sit outside” the secure HR or student system . For example, an external survey platform or a generic form tool might have “no data security” features like granular user permissions or encryption at rest. This means additional safeguards and agreements have to be put in place to protect the data, and even then, the data is more exposed than if it stayed within the core system. Furthermore, ensuring only authorized personnel can see certain feedback (e.g. only allowing a counseling center to view mental health survey comments) becomes an administrative challenge when data is off-platform. In short, externalizing the feedback process can introduce security vulnerabilities and compliance issues that universities need to manage carefully.
Friction for Student Respondents: Achieving a high response rate and honest input requires making the feedback process as easy as possible for students. Any extra hassle – separate logins, confusing links, or poorly timed requests – will reduce the likelihood that students participate thoughtfully, or at all. With many traditional survey setups, students receive an email with a survey link that takes them to another website. They might need to verify their identity or log in, or the survey might not be mobile-friendly. Each additional click or hurdle can lead to drop-off. To truly close the loop on engagement, feedback needs to be collected from a substantial portion of students, so minimizing friction is key. Ideally, students should be able to respond to surveys within the platforms they already use daily. Some institutions are exploring embedding surveys into student portals, learning management systems, or even messaging apps like Slack/Teams to meet students where they are. For example, if a student could fill out a feedback form directly through a mobile app or chat prompt they already have open, it removes barriers like extra logins. The challenge with many survey tools is that they exist outside the student’s regular workflow, making feedback an “out-of-band” task that is easier to ignore. Streamlining the feedback request – in timing, format, and platform – is a process challenge that must be addressed to get robust engagement in surveys.
In summary, process issues such as slow reaction time, security complications, and user experience friction can prevent feedback initiatives from reaching their full potential. To close the loop, institutions need to not only gather data but do so quickly, safely, and in a student-friendly way.
Closing the Loop with OnSurvey: Built-on Workday App
How can universities overcome these challenges and truly close the student feedback loop? One approach is to use a platform that integrates feedback collection within the main student system. OnSurvey is a prime example: it’s a native Workday app (built on Workday Extend) designed specifically to enable seamless surveys and feedback workflows inside Workday’s environment . By operating within Workday Student (and other Workday modules), OnSurvey eliminates many of the pain points of external survey tools and makes it much easier to go from feedback to action.
What is OnSurvey? In simple terms, OnSurvey lets institutions create, distribute, and analyze surveys directly in Workday, using their existing data and security infrastructure . There are no separate databases or exports to manage – everything happens in one system. It’s built to drive “secure, contextual, and real-time feedback that drives action” . Below, we break down how OnSurvey addresses the earlier challenges:
Seamless Integration & Contextual Feedback: Because OnSurvey is part of Workday, it can leverage all the student and academic data already in the system. This means surveys can be event-driven and context-specific. For example, you can set a survey to auto-trigger when a certain event occurs – say, when a student completes a course or a term, or when a first-year student reaches the end of their first semester. Workday’s business process framework allows OnSurvey to fire off surveys at virtually any step (e.g. after a course enrollment is completed, upon dorm check-in, after an advising meeting, etc.) . This ensures feedback is collected at the perfect moment – immediately after the relevant experience – when the student’s memory is fresh and their input will be most accurate. (One best practice is to **“trigger [a survey] immediately after the event” because fresh memory yields better insight .) Moreover, since OnSurvey can pull in Workday fields into the survey content, each response is automatically tied to context like the specific course, instructor, or service in question. It can even merge background data into questions or answer options (for instance, showing a student the list of organizations they participated in and asking which was most impactful). This live integration of data means no more trying to manually match survey responses to student records after the fact – context is preserved by design. The upshot: OnSurvey’s in-platform integration tackles the silos and context-loss issue head on.
Real-Time Analysis & Actionable Insights: With OnSurvey, all response data is stored within Workday’s database, becoming immediately available for analysis using Workday’s native reporting and analytics tools. There’s no need to wait on CSV exports or nightly data syncs. Institutional researchers or administrators can run Workday reports or Prism analytics on the survey results as soon as responses come in . This dramatically accelerates the feedback cycle – instead of a week-long delay , you can get same-day insights from your surveys . Faster insights enable faster action: trends or red flags in the feedback can be spotted and addressed in near real-time. For example, if an orientation feedback survey (triggered right after orientation) reveals many students felt unprepared to register for classes, the university can immediately deploy additional advising resources or send out a clarification email, rather than finding out much later. OnSurvey not only provides the data quickly, but because it’s Workday-native, you can create dashboards that mash up survey results with other student data (GPAs, demographics, etc.) without complex integration. This single-system approach transforms the process from “ask and archive” (where surveys are one-off and forgotten) to a “listen and act” mentality . In other words, feedback stops being a checkbox exercise and becomes an integral part of decision-making. The ability to tie surveys into Workday business processes also means you can directly route information for action. For instance, low satisfaction scores in a course evaluation could automatically trigger a task or alert to the department chair for follow-up. By embedding the entire feedback loop (from collection to analysis to action) inside the system of record, OnSurvey helps ensure that survey results lead to concrete next steps.
Security and Privacy by Design: OnSurvey inherits Workday’s robust security framework, which is a huge win for protecting sensitive feedback. All survey responses remain in the Workday cloud, behind the same security domains and role-based permissions that already safeguard student data . In practice, this means only the people who should see certain feedback will see it, with no special effort needed to duplicate security rules externally. For example, if academic department heads are the only ones allowed to view course evaluation results for their department, Workday security settings can enforce that automatically for OnSurvey responses. Data never leaves the trusted system, eliminating the risks associated with exporting student feedback to third-party databases . Additionally, because it’s within Workday, features like single sign-on and user authentication are consistent – there’s no separate login for students or admins, reducing the risk of phishing or compromised credentials on an external survey site. In short, OnSurvey provides enterprise-level data protection out of the box. The app “inherits Workday’s security domains for controlled survey access and visibility,” meaning surveys can be open to the intended respondents yet locked down from unauthorized eyes . This addresses the security and privacy challenge elegantly, allowing institutions to gather honest feedback (even on sensitive topics) with confidence that it’s protected by the same policies as other student records.
Frictionless Student Experience: Since OnSurvey operates inside the Workday Student system that many universities use as a student portal, it can present surveys to students in a familiar, convenient way. Students are not sent off to an unrelated website; instead, they might receive a survey notification in their Workday inbox or see a prompt in the campus mobile app. This integration reduces extra steps. For example, a student who just completed an online class might get a pop-up or task in Workday to rate the course – they can complete it in seconds without any additional login. By meeting students within the platform they already use to check grades, register, etc., OnSurvey likely boosts participation rates. Furthermore, because surveys can be timed with events (and even limited to a short duration), students encounter them when relevant, not weeks later via a random email. The ease of access and contextual timing encourages students to provide feedback when it matters most. In the future, this approach could extend to other channels as well. (Notably, OnSurvey has been made available on Microsoft Teams AppSource , hinting at potential to integrate survey interactions into collaboration tools in addition to Workday’s own interface.) The core idea is to reduce friction and “meet users at their place of collaboration,” as doing so will naturally improve response rates and the quality of feedback collected.
By addressing technical and process challenges in this holistic way, OnSurvey enables institutions to truly close the loop on student engagement feedback. The platform not only simplifies the act of collecting feedback but also ties it directly to analysis and action. As the saying goes, the future of intelligence is action – meaning insights only matter if they lead to real outcomes. OnSurvey is built with that philosophy: it helps universities listen to students and then immediately do something with that insight within the same system. A best-practice checklist for high-impact surveys includes closing the loop (e.g. communicating back “you said, we did” to respondents) , and with an integrated solution, it becomes much easier to follow through on this promise. In sum, OnSurvey transforms feedback from a siloed, after-the-fact data point into a seamless part of the student success workflow.
Get Started with OnSurvey
Closing the feedback loop on student engagement is essential for continuously improving the student experience. By gathering timely, meaningful feedback and acting on it decisively, institutions can foster higher student satisfaction, engagement, and success. Surveys and feedback mechanisms are not just about data they’re about demonstrating to students that their input drives positive change. Overcoming the technical and process barriers is key to making this a reality.
OnSurvey offers a modern, integrated way to achieve this goal in a Workday Student environment. By embedding survey capabilities into the fabric of the student system, it ensures feedback is collected in context, analyzed quickly, and routed to action. The days of juggling multiple survey tools and waiting weeks for insights can be left behind in favor of a unified “listen and act” approach .
If your institution is looking to boost student engagement and truly close the feedback loop, now is the time to explore OnSurvey, built-on Workday native app is available via the Workday Marketplace. Imagine being able to send out a course evaluation, see the results come in live within Workday, and immediately kick off improvements or follow-ups. That is the power of an integrated feedback loop. Try OnSurvey for your Workday Student use cases and experience how it can help turn student feedback into action.
