Comments on Learning Environment Instrument

The first thing I noticed about the survey is that there is a student profile section to help in analysing the data. However, I have some difficulty in understanding the need for knowing the Father's/Mother's country of birth. I feel that this may not be a relevant question in our context since most of our students' parents are increasing from different parts of the world.

The 2 surveys are designed with similar scale to obtain response from the students' and teacher's perspective. This survey design will allow comparison of what the teacher's intent with the effect the lesson has on the students. This will provide a more comprehensive analysis on the effectiveness of learning environment from the 2 main stakeholders of the learning process. Another design of the survey is to compare the preferred and actual perception of the environment. This allows a comparison of expectation with actual situation. However, by having the preferred and actual response side by side in the survey may lead to some respondents' biasness. I was faced with this dilemma recently when my boss requested me to reflect the individual's pre-course survey response in the post survey form so that the trainees' have a baseline to refer to. The decision then was to provide the pre course response to the trainees so that the trainees will know how they have responded (6 months ago) and to accept some possiblity of biasness.

In terms of the 9 scales for the survey, I feel that they are comprehensive in coverage. However, I would want to make some slight amendments to the question items in Computer usage. With more use of web based learning in the internet, I would add questions on speed of retreival, ease of use of the webpage, availability of online forums and usage of shared documents.