The Data You Already Have
Everyone knows that universities collect end-of-course surveys. Students fill them out at the end of every term, rating their experience, commenting on the course, and sharing what worked and what didn’t. Institutions gather this data consistently, analyze it regularly, and use it primarily to evaluate instructor performance.
As an instructional designer and learning strategist, I see that as a missed opportunity.
Student feedback contains some of the most honest and specific information available about the quality of your online programs. The problem is that most institutions are reading it through the wrong lens. When a student says the course was disorganized, the instinct is to look at the instructor. When students say they didn’t know what was expected, the conversation turns to communication skills. When complaints pile up about responsiveness, the focus lands on faculty workload or availability.
In many cases, those aren’t instructor problems. They are instructional design problems, and they require a completely different solution.
What Students Are Actually Saying
Student complaints tend to cluster around a handful of recurring themes. On the surface, they sound like feedback about teaching, but if you look closer, you’ll realize that they’re describing structural gaps in how the course was built.
“The course felt disorganized.”
When students say a course feels disorganized, they’re usually describing an experience where they couldn’t see how the pieces connected. This could be that one week didn’t lead logically to the next, activities felt random, or the overall direction of the course wasn’t clear. It’s a course architecture problem. A well-designed course has a visible structure that learners can orient themselves within. When that structure is missing, even a highly capable instructor can’t compensate for it.
“I didn’t know what was expected of me.”
This complaint points almost directly to poorly written learning objectives and unclear assessment criteria. If students don’t know what success looks like, it’s because no one defined it clearly at the design stage. Measurable objectives, transparent rubrics, and explicit connections between activities and outcomes are instructional design responsibilities. They have to be built into the course before anyone logs in. An instructor explaining expectations verbally in a live class is one thing, but in an asynchronous online course, if it isn’t written into the design, it doesn’t exist.
“The professor wasn’t responsive.”
This one is worth looking at carefully before assuming it’s a faculty issue. In many cases, students aren’t actually asking for faster email replies, but describing a course where feedback loops were missing entirely. Specifically, there were no formative checkpoints, no low-stakes opportunities to find out if they were on the right track before a major assignment was due, and no mechanism built into the course for students to surface confusion early. When feedback is only built in at the end of a unit or module, students feel unsupported throughout, and they describe that feeling as the instructor being absent, even when, in reality, the instructor is doing everything asked of them.
“There was too much busywork.”
When students use this phrase, they’re usually describing activities that felt disconnected from anything meaningful. For example, discussion posts they wrote because they were required to, not because they were genuinely engaging with an idea, or assignments that didn’t seem to connect to the learning outcomes the course claimed to address. Busywork is what happens when activities are added to a course because they are common in online learning, not because they were chosen for a specific instructional purpose. Every activity in a well-designed course should earn its place. When it doesn’t, students notice.
“The course was too hard to follow.”
Difficulty following a course is often a pacing and sequencing issue. In many cases, content was introduced too quickly without enough scaffolding to help learners build understanding gradually. Complex ideas appeared before foundational ones were solid. Simply put, there wasn’t enough practice before the stakes got high. These are design decisions, or the absence of them, and they show up in student experience as confusion, frustration, and disengagement.
Why This Distinction Matters
When institutions treat these complaints as instructor performance issues, a few things happen. Faculty feel unfairly evaluated for problems they didn’t create and often can’t fix. Professional development resources get directed at teaching skills when the real gap is in course structure. And the same complaints appear in the next round of surveys, because the root cause was never addressed.
Reframing these complaints as instructional design problems changes what the solution looks like. It shifts the question from “how do we get this instructor to perform better?” to “how do we build courses that set both instructors and students up to succeed?”
That’s a fundamentally different conversation, and it leads to fundamentally different outcomes.
What Good Course Design Prevents
Most of the complaints above are predictable. Experienced instructional designers recognize them before a course ever launches because they’ve seen what happens when certain design elements are missing.
Clear learning objectives prevent the “I didn’t know what was expected” complaint. A logical course arc with visible connections between weeks prevents the disorganized feeling. Formative assessment and structured feedback touchpoints prevent the sense that the instructor is absent. Purposeful activity design prevents busywork. Thoughtful sequencing and scaffolding prevent learners from feeling lost.
None of this is complicated in principle, but it requires someone to think through the learning experience deliberately, before content gets built, before the course goes live, and before students start forming opinions that end up in your survey data.
A Different Way to Read Your Data
If your institution has end-of-course survey data sitting in a report somewhere, it’s worth going back through it with a different question in mind. Instead of asking “which instructors are underperforming?” consider asking “which of these patterns point to design gaps we can actually fix?”
Complaints that appear consistently across multiple instructors in the same program are rarely about individual teaching quality. They’re mainly about the program’s structure. And the good news is that structure is something that can be redesigned.
Let’s Talk About Your Program
If your institution has survey data showing patterns you haven’t been able to resolve, or if you’re building new online courses and want to get the design right from the start, I can help.
I work with universities and colleges to identify where course design is falling short and build learning experiences that work better for students and faculty alike. The goal is always the same: fewer complaints, stronger outcomes, and programs your students actually want to recommend.
Get in touch through the contact form on my website at https://yourelearningworld.com/contact/ and let’s take a look at what your data is telling you.
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