Feedback facility claims innovation award

Two Imperial students are developing a new web application to help improve the student experience, after winning an award for their innovative idea.

Thomas Lim and Dario Magliocchetti-Lombi (both from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering)  have been awarded £5000 by digital technology charity Jisc to continue their work on TeachBack, a student feedback application for graduate teaching  assistants. 

TeachBack's inception came when the pair realised there are no feedback programmes focused on teaching assistants, and that an easy mechanism to support this could be beneficial to the student experience. 

Thomas said: “Although systems are in place for students to offer feedback on lecturers, we realised that the option to give regular feedback on graduate teaching assistants, who often support students with lab work, didn’t exist. We quickly developed TeachBack for our department and when we heard about the competition we knew we should enter our idea.

"Receiving the email from Jisc saying we had been selected as one of the winners was wonderful.” 

University students were invited to submit their ideas to improve the student experience using digital platforms as part of the Jisc Summer of Student Innovation competition. Students were asked to produce a short film to pitch their idea, with each entry requiring a minimum of 150 student votes from at least three different universities to reach the final stages of the competition.

In total 36 ideas were entered into the competition, with 33 gaining enough votes to be considered. TeachBack was one of 21 projects selected to receive £5000 for further development, allowing the application idea to become a reality. 

Thomas and Dario have set up a blog to keep readers updated as the project progresses. Read the blog. 

Thomas and Dario's video pitch:

Winning idea

"As Electrical and Electronic Engineering students we spend a lot time in the lab working closely with the teaching assistants. We realised that a programme where students could quickly and easily submit feedback on teaching assistants after each lab experiment could help improve the student experience. The idea of TeachBack was born.

Dario and I set about building a rough prototype to use in our Department. We constructed a simple programme to begin with but the interface and ease of use proved a hit with students. Since then staff from other departments have also contacted us to enquire about the system. 

When we heard about the competition it came at a tricky time, right in the middle of the exam period, but we couldn't turn down the potential to win funding for our project!

After recording our video straight after an exam we used our network of contacts to gather support in time for the competition deadline. Doug Hunt the former Deputy President (Education) and this year’s Editor of Felix, Tim Arbabzadah helped promote our campaign through Imperial College Union and friends encouraged people to vote through Facebook and Twitter. Seeing 150 votes come in just over twenty-four hours was a real relief, and the feedback we were getting was that people really believed in our idea.

Our next challenge is to build the TeachBack platform so that it can integrate with other College systems. We also want to design the system in a way which potentially could see other universities using it."