Reference Groups

At IIK, all courses must have a reference group. This includes all teaching activities that have a course code, that means also specialization courses and courses for project, bachelor's and master's theses.

NTNU indeed allows other means of evaluation. However, it is explicit IIK policy that all courses require a reference group. You can, of course, add other evaluation forms (like meetings with the entire class, or additional surveys, for instance).

IIK is stricter regarding reference groups than the NTNU standard. This is because reference groups work well for our types of courses, we want to have similar rules and guidelines for all courses and we want to ensure a certain standard for our entire course portfolio.

Surveys are a good additional way to gather quantitative feedback from students. You can conduct them in addition to reference group meeting, if you want. The reference group provide you with a qualitative feedback that allows for a dialog between you and students that you can use for strategically developing the course.

Creating Reference Groups

Log in to KASPER

A reference group must consist of at least three students, but often more students (for instance up to six) make the discussion richer, and easier to assure that at least three students can meet for the reference group meetings. The members should be representative of the students in the course, with respect to aspects like gender, study program, or exchange status.

The reference group must be registered in KASPER. Once it has been registered a team will be automatically created on MS Teams with a process support ('Prosesstøtte') tab providing functions for the students to submit their report at the end of the semester and for you as course coordinator to add/remove members and publish the reference group report.

  • Establish the reference group already during the first week of lectures.
  • Announce that you want to form a reference group beforehand on Blackboard, and ask for volunteers to signal their interest to you.

If your course has only few students, declare the entire course to be the reference group and have reference group meeting with all students.

  • Explain how you have worked with reference groups earlier and how that lead to specific improvements in the course.
  • In higher classes, mention that if students want to use you as a reference in their CV, this would be a way for you to getting to know them (if relevant).
  • Contact the KTV student of the cohort to motivate some of the students in class.
  • Contact or the SPL of the study program.

Information to Students

We have collected information relevant for the students in reference groups on this separate page. Just provide the link to this page to the students.

Reference Group Meetings

The reference group should meet at least three times during the semester. The first meeting should be early in the semester, to detect any misunderstandings or problems with the course setup as early as possible.

  • Focus of the meetings should be on the learning environment in the course. Don't ask too much "How do you like the course?", but rather "What did you learn?" and "How can you learn better?"
  • Tell students that you are interested in constructive feedback, and how valuable such feedback is for you.
  • Inform students that they should write minutes for each reference group meeting as a preparation for the final reference group report.
  • If you are teach a course with a colleague, make sure they join the reference group meeting. If you teach alone, invite a colleague into the meeting. This can help reflecting on the student feedback.
  • Consider to which degree you want to involve learning assistants in the reference group meetings.

We observe that some issues in a course that lead to problems later could have been prevented by simple countermeasures early in the semester. Having the first reference group meeting early helps to uncover them.

Reference Group Report

The reference group writes a final report using the template in the Teams for reference groups. Once the students finish, you must submit this report using the functionality in the created Teams.

Proof of participation

Students participating in the reference group receive a proof of experience when the semester is over.