Student Focus Groups

To help undergraduate and graduate programs collect rich student feedback that will help inform their self-study as part of the cyclical program review process, the OAQE now offers support with the facilitation of student focus groups.

To best enable productive conversations, student focus groups consist of an interactive exercise (combination of World Café and Dotmocracy) with about 10-25 senior program students, as facilitated by a student leader trained and supported by the OAQE.

The outcome is a summary report prepared by the facilitator that outlines the participant perceptions of program strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, along with any ideas related to leveraging or mitigating these. This report can then be used by the program leadership to help inform the self-study.

To learn more about this initiative, please see the informational e-mail for program leaders and the draft invitation typically sent to program students below. Should you have any questions or be interested in setting up a focus group session, please contact OAQE@uwo.ca.

 

Informational Message to Program Leaders

Dear Program Leader,

Following up on the offer of support with the facilitation of student focus groups, here are a few details for those that may be interested.

We will be training a small group of undergraduate and graduate student leaders in early February to facilitate interactive focus groups with program students.

  1. Focus groups typically take place from mid-February to mid-April, and given the interactive structure, would optimally require 10-25 student participants (typically more senior students to speak to a breadth of program experiences).
  2. Typically, the focus group would be held midday over two hours, with the program supplying lunch (e.g., pizza).
  3. The focus group can be held in a departmental classroom or the Office of Academic Quality and Enhancement (OAQE) can coordinate use of a classroom in the IGAB building in the centre of campus.
  4. The outcome would be a summary report prepared by the facilitator that outlines the participant perceptions of program strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges, along with any ideas related to leveraging or mitigating these. This report can be used to help inform the self-study, perhaps even appended to it.

 

The commitment on behalf of the program would be to: 1) determine an optimal date and time; 2) recruit a group of 10-25 student participants; and 3) supply a lunch to the participants.

 

Sample Invitation to Program Students

This year is particularly important for all of us as the ___________ Program is undergoing its cyclical review. As part of this process, we have recently begun a self-study to take stock of how the many aspects of the program ensure its quality and sustainability (e.g., curriculum, resources, supports). To help inform our program self-study, we seek your honest input and invite you to participate in an interactive focus group facilitated by a fellow student from another Faculty. The focus group activity will be run with 10-25 fellow students and will aim to elicit program strengths, weaknesses and opportunities.

We are planning to run the focus group on _[date]_ at_[time]_ in _[location]_. A pizza lunch will be provided. Please confirm your availability by responding to this e-mail.

This process is important to the future of our program, I hope that you will be able to join.