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Digital semesters, remote exams, 2x #moodletrouble, numerous innovations – a lot has happened in the last 12 months and RWTHmoodle, as the central teaching and learning platform, has always been in the thick of things. All the more reason for us to want to know this year how the system has fared with users and where there is still room for improvement. That’s why we launched our annual user survey in July 2021. The focus was on the events mentioned above. We would like to discuss the individual results here.
Highest participation so far
40,300 people (students and staff) who actively used at least one course room during the summer semester were contacted and asked to participate in the RWTHmoodle user survey. A total of 3,719 users complied with this request, ensuring the highest participation for a RWTHmoodle user survey.
A look at the average overall rating shows that satisfaction with the platform in general has declined somewhat (2020: 1.92; 2021: 2.29). RWTHmoodle was evaluated on the basis of school grades from 1 (Very good) to 5 (Poor). Above all, the reliability and availability of the system have declined considerably in the eyes of the users. While in 2020 most users disagreed with the statement “RWTHmoodle is often unavailable” (mean 2.0), the opposite was true in 2021 (mean 3.28). The situation was similar for the statement “Overall, RWTHmoodle is reliable.” Agreement dropped sharply between 2020 (4.16) and 2021 (3.21). Both statements could be rated on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).
The RWTHmoodle team is working hard to improve this. We are aware that the platform must be reliable and available, especially during the digital semesters. Thus, first measures were already taken after #moodletrouble to improve and stabilize RWTHmoodle. In the course of the last few months, many other adjustments were made to ensure that the system can withstand the steadily increasing number of users.
Remote exams on RWTHmoodle and temp-Moodle
The focus of the digital semesters at RWTH Aachen University was not only on the reliability and availability of RWTHmoodle. Among other things, the implementation of the exams, which were offered for the first time at RWTH Aachen as remote exams, also played an important role. While RWTHmoodle was used for these exams in the winter semester 2020/21, the IT Center provided a second Moodle instance “temp-Moodle” in the summer semester 2021. Thus, in addition to Dynexite, a second platform was exclusively available to examiners for conducting exams. In the course of our user survey, we naturally wanted to know how the users rated the exam administration with RWTHmoodle and temp-Moodle. The statement “Overall, exam administration via RWTHmoodle / temp-Moodle worked well.” achieved an average value of 3.85 on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Overall, 68% of the participants in the survey took exams as students (61%) or supervised exams as employees (7%). All in all, the users were satisfied with the systems used.
More detailed results online
You want more results from the current user survey? You can find a detailed list of the figures obtained and an explanation of our methodology on our homepage. In addition to the summer semester 2021, you can also find the results of previous semesters here.
Even though we would like to continue the user surveys, you do not have to wait until the next survey to give us your feedback. Suggestions for improvement and criticism of RWTHmoodle can be sent to the IT-ServiceDesk at any time.
We will gladly take them on board in order to continuously improve RWTHmoodle for everyone at the university.
Responsible for the content of this article is Anastasios Krikas.
