We ask facilitators and participants a few questions at different times during the life cycle of a learning circle. We want the questions to be thoughtful and the information gathered to be useful. After getting some input from facilitators in Boston last year, we started working on improving the process.

Overall it was a process of taking what we already had, ensuring that we don’t ask unnecessary questions, that questions are useful and that there is consistency between what we ask facilitators and what we ask learners.

Let’s start with an overview of what we ask and when we ask it. The diagram below shows the timeline for a single learning circle:

Learning circle creation

The first step in this process is a facilitator creating a learning circle. We didn’t change anything about this process, but it’s worth pointing out that we are asking these two questions:

1. “What do you hope to achieve by facilitating this learning circle?“
2. “Is there anything that we can help you with as you get started?”

The answers to these questions are shared with a Welcome Committee, which includes both P2PU staff and veteran facilitators from around the world.

Learner signup

We simplified the learner signup so that we’re only asking what P2PU needs to know. We removed a few questions about digital literacy and computer access from the signup form. Facilitators still have the option of adding an additional question that participants will be asked when they signed up, and in the future we will add additional customization to the sign up page. Finally, we add a communications opt in to distinguish between communications related to the learning circle and general P2PU communications. This is what the signup form now looks like:

Learner surveys

We overhauled the learner survey to serve as a baseline for assessing learning circle quality and a prompt for feedback about the online course. In the future, we’ll build out the ability to customize these questions on a team-by-team basis. These are the questions we’re asking learners in the survey:

1. What did you hope to achieve when you joined this learning circle?
2. To what extent did you achieve this? (1-5 scale)
3. Do you feel more confident about what you just learned in [course title]? (1-5 scale)
4. How do you intend to apply what you learned?
5. How well did the online course work as a learning circle? (1-5 stars and reason)
6. Please share any other impressions you had about the online course.
7. How likely are you to recommend participating in a learning circle to a friend or colleague? (1-5 starts and reason)

Learners will receive an email right before the last meeting asking them to complete the survey. Facilitators can also find the link for the learner survey on their dashboard and manually share it with learners:

Facilitator survey

We’ve similarly cut down the facilitator survey. Facilitators will also receive an email right before the last meeting asking them to complete the survey. This is what the facilitator survey look like:

1. What did you hope to achieve when you signed up to facilitate this learning circle?
2. To what extent did you achieve this? (1-5 scale)
3. Did anything about the learning circle surprise you?
4. Do you have any stories from the learning circle you want to share with the P2PU community?
5. About how many people showed up for the first, second and last meetings?
6. How well did the online course work as a learning circle? (1-5 stars and reason)
7. How likely are you to recommend facilitating a learning circle to a friend or colleague? (1-5 scale and reason)

A link to the facilitator survey is also available on facilitator’s learning circle dashboard.

Learning circle insights

Using the feedback facilitators and learners provide, we generate an anonymized, public document called “learning circle insights”:

Letter writing activity

To avoid too many activities during the final meeting, we’ve stopped sending facilitators an email asking them to write a letter to other learning circles. You are still welcome to do so, just send an email directly to us and we’ll share it with another learning circle. Or better, write a short story about your learning circle that can be shared with everyone!

Courses

For courses, we’ve changed how we gather feedback in the survey. In the past we asked learners and facilitators to select tags from a dropdown list, but since different people have such different experiences with the same course, we’ve found it to be difficult to make these tags be accurate and useful for everyone.

For now we’re only showing the rating and some highlights from the discourse thread, but we would like to hear from you it what ways you want to leave course feedback and see course feedback from other learners and facilitators.

Tell us what you think by visiting our community forum.