5 reasons why your feedback counts!

In any organisation providing a product or service, user feedback is a powerful and important way to learn about the value you bring, even more so in a purpose-driven organisation like Apps for Good! We’ve outlined 5 reasons why your feedback counts.

When organisations like ours ask for feedback, it’s not just about improving our products and services. It’s also about ensuring that our computing courses have the positive impact they are designed to deliver for you and your students. At Apps for Good, impact management is about understanding whether our courses are positively influencing the short and long-term outcomes in our Theory of Change, then making informed decisions about what needs to change to deepen that impact. We can’t manage our impact if we don’t know what students and teachers think about our courses.

Our course is 100% free to schools and we want it to stay that way! We’re a charity and it’s thanks to the generous support of our partners that each year we provide over 700 schools and 30,000+ young people with free access to our computing courses. We need to share our impact data and user feedback with current and potential partners, so that they can understand the return on their social investment and keep funding us. Partners appreciate hearing stories about the young people we work with as much as seeing the numbers.

No! We’ve made great progress, but there’s still a long way to go before every young person has the tech innovation and essential skills to shape their future. Your feedback holds us to account and helps us understand if we’re moving in the right direction towards the world we want to see.

We think you’ll agree - learning is a journey. We’ll never stop learning, evolving and iterating our course content to ensure that young people benefit from what Apps for Good has to offer. Apps for Good is part of a wider ecosystem that exists in collaboration with educators, industry partners, volunteers, Government and other social impact organisations with shared values and a desire to bring the benefits of technology to the innovators of tomorrow. It’s vital we learn together, share as we go and continue to provide innovative new opportunities for young people.

We know that providing feedback takes time, energy and resources - and these can be in short supply within education settings. That’s why we want to ensure your insights have tangible benefits for you. When we receive feedback from students and the delivering teacher, via the final lesson reflection activity, we can provide you with a report on your specific results. This summarises the survey data we've gathered, and will give you an insight into how students found the course as well as the knowledge and skills they developed. You can use this report to demonstrate the impact of Apps for Good courses - and similar projects - to your various stakeholders. Check out this example.

Giving feedback comes with a digital “certified educator” badge for delivering teachers. This can be downloaded at the end of the final reflection activity, and be added to your email signature, LinkedIn profile etc. Students can download a participation certificate, which lists the skills and knowledge they’ve gained and can be used as evidence as they apply for and access future opportunities.

Our course, AI for Good 2.0, has reflection activities embedded into the platform to make giving feedback even easier; educators can share quickfire feedback as they move from one lesson to the next. In the final lesson of the course, time has been allocated to final reflections for both educators and students and the links are clearly highlighted on the platform as the final step. Once the reflection is submitted, educators can immediately download their “certified educator” digital badge and students can download their participation certificates.

If you’d like to find out more about our feedback collection or evaluation processes, our Impact Manager Lou would love to hear from you on louise.jones@appsforgood.org. Or if you’d like to discuss your Apps for Good course delivery you can reach our education team at education@appsforgood.org.