I value student feedback and try to implement changes that address their concerns. Each term myself and other members of the school of physics teaching committee meet with course representatives elected from each of the courses. The course representatives talk to their peers and sometimes survey them to bring us feedback. We meet half way through the course and at the end. I find this method for obtaining feedback very helpful as we have open, respectful discussions where we can brainstorm possible solutions to the problems that arise in our courses. This also ensures that problems are flagged early and do not come as a surprise in myExperience surveys at the end of term.

A change that we are implementing in term 1 2020 based on student feedback is moving from one hour to two hour lectures. From a learning perspective one hour lectures should work better as this provides more opportunities to refresh the material in the students' memories and makes it more likely that the concepts will move to their long term memory. However, students pointed out that many of them had to undertake long commutes to come to campus so they would really prefer to come less days. They explained that with two hour lectures attendance would increase. I have collected data on student attendance in my lecture streams in term 3 2019 when we had one hour lectures and will collect this data again in term 1 2020 with the two hour lectures so that we can check the change is having the desired impact.

The course representative system also works well for giving information back to students. Sometimes the changes the students want are not practical or not a good idea. We can explain why this is to the course representative and then they feed it back to other students in the course. One example of a change that has been requested but not granted is a request for solutions to the problem solving workshop problems. These problems are designed to address common misconceptions, students do not learn from reading the answers, when they read the answers the answers seem obvious, it is only through trying the question and recognizing the misleading thought patterns that they learn.

In 2019 I completely rewrote one of our online courses, PHYS9120, Mechanics for Teachers after feedback from the 2018 cohort about the course. In 2018 the course focused very heavily on how to mathematically answer physics questions with very little discussion of how to teach it. The feedback from students was very positive in 2019 after the changes.