Palaute: An Online Text Mining Tool for Analyzing Written Student Course Feedback

Collecting student feedback is commonplace in universities. These surveys usually include both open-ended questions and Likert-type scale questions but the answers to open questions tend not to be analysed further than simply reading them. Recent research has shown that text mining and machine learning methods can be utilized to extract useful topics from masses of open student feedback. However, to our knowledge, not many off-the-shelf applications exist for processing open-ended student feedback automatically. Additionally, the use of text mining tools may not be available to all educators, as they require in-depth knowledge of text-mining, data analysis, or programming tools. To address this gap the current study presents a tool (Palaute) for analyzing written student feedback using topic modeling and emotion analysis. The utility of this tool is demonstrated with two real-life use cases: First, we analyze student feedback data collected from courses in a software engineering degree programme, and then feedback from all courses organized in a university. In our experiments, the analysis of open-ended feedback revealed that on certain software engineering course modules the workload is perceived as heavy, and on some programming courses the automatic code grader could be improved. The university-wide analysis produced indicators of good teaching quality, such as interesting courses, but also some concrete improvement points like the time given to complete course assignments. Therefore, the use of the tool resulted in actionable improvement points, which could not have been identified using only numeric feedback metrics. Based on the demonstrated utility, this paper describes the design and implementation of our open-source tool.