positive sentiment wordcloud with words like group, information, trainers, etc.

The Minnesota Child Welfare Training Academy regularly collects learner feedback for all trainings conducted by our staff and community trainers. Internally, we review that data to provide information to our trainers and curriculum developers in order to continuously improve our trainings.

As part of an end-of-course survey, learners are asked to respond to the following two open-ended items: "Overall, what went well in this course?" and "Overall, what could be improved in this course?"

Through these survey items, learners are given the opportunity to provide positive and negative feedback about the course. Data were analyzed for these two items related to Training Academy courses held between July 2020 and January 2022.

negative sentiment wordcloud with words like time, training, breaks, etc.

The word clouds shown in this article demonstrate the types of comments made by learners (the larger and more prominent the word, the more frequently it was shared in the learner feedback). While our evaluation and credentialing team conducts a more sophisticated analysis of the learner feedback, we thought these word clouds provided an interesting snapshot of the feedback from the last two years of virtual training.

For example, in the positive word grouping, learners tended to have good feedback about "discussions." In the negative word grouping, it is not surprising to see that "time" is an issue. While the more in-depth analysis will provide better insight to improving our training, visualizing data in a variety of ways helps us to experience the information differently, allowing us to approach feedback from various perspectives.

Has this article reminded you of your experiences in our trainings? We always welcome your feedback, and encourage you to reach out anytime. You can use this feedback form, or just contact us directly.