If you’ve taken one of our courses, you know that there’s no shortage of ways to get in touch with us. We love your feedback, so we try to make it easy for you to give it to us: we have live chat and phone operators standing by 24/7, we read every email we get, we take feedback from inside our course player, and when a student completes our course, we ask them how it went, and we ask them to rate us from 1 to 5 stars.
The vast majority of comments we receive are positive, which is actually very helpful. When we see which lessons and teaching strategies get the most positive feedback, we learn about what’s most interesting and understandable to our students. When students are engaged with material that makes sense to them, real learning happens! That means more safe drivers–something we’re truly committed to at DriversEd.com.
On the other side of the coin, we do receive some negative feedback. Case in point: two of our employees recently noticed that our Texas 32-Hour Drivers Ed course was receiving a significant number of 1-star reviews, so we decided to look into it. After deep-diving into feedback from inside the course player and from the end-of-course survey, reading over 10,000 comments along the way, we were able to pin down the primary sources of the problem: course length and test question difficulty.
When it comes to the length of our Texas Teen Drivers Ed course, unfortunately, our hands are tied. State regulations require our online course to be no less than 32 hours long–and that’s still a far cry from the 56 hours required if you take the course in a classroom!.
However, after carrying out a thorough review of the test questions used in the course, and in particular the course’s movie quiz questions, we came to agree with our students: some of our movie quiz questions were too challenging! Many students commented that, after paying close attention to the safe driving tips in a movie, they were baffled when the movie quiz asked something like: “Which of the characters in the video was wearing sunglasses?”
Although state regulations require us to ask questions the student would not be able to answer without watching the movie, we found that we could work within the rules to bring our test questions closer into alignment with our students’ expectations. So we wrote more than 50 new questions for over 20 movies used in the course, obtained the required regulatory approval for the changes, and today, we rolled them out in an update to our course!
Time–and copious amounts of helpful user feedback–will tell whether we’ve found the right solution to our Texas 32-Hour Teen Drivers Ed students’ movie quiz question woes. We’ll keep our ears to the ground to see how our students respond to these changes in the coming months. Rest assured, at DriversEd.com, we don’t just listen to your comments–we act on them!