I didn't want a tool that just gave back a generic, robotic summary of "the students were satisfied." I wanted something that could look at a massive dump of anonymous survey data and instantly separate the signal from the noise. The way it works now is completely straightforward. You just upload the raw survey data or the feedback text, and Ped handles the heavy lifting. He cleans up the data, filters out the random anomalies, and breaks everything down into actual, actionable insights.
My real "Ah-ha" moment with this tool didn't happen while grading essays at my desk. It happened during in person presentations in January. If you've ever sat in a room marking student presentations for eight hours straight, you know the score. There is no time between presentations to type formal feedback into Canvas. If you wait until the end of the day, all the presentations blur into one and you can’t fully remember who said what. I had made notes in Word following a tracker but by the time I got to actually formalising my notes, I couldn't remember all of the presentations or expand on my inital notes. I could watch the presentations back via panopto, but that would take another few hours.
Without a doubt, the scheme of work is one of the most tedious administrative aspects of higher education. You have to map out the learning outcomes, figure out how to chunk the theory so you don't overwhelm the class by week three, and invent creative active-learning ideas for every single session. By the time you get to week seven, your brain is usually fried. You stop being creative and just start copying and pasting generic phrases like "class discussion" or "group work" into the boxes just to get the thing finished.
Last summer, I decided to stop fighting the prompts and went down a rabbit hole. I wanted a tool where a tired lecturer could just upload an old slide deck, a syllabus, or a dry topic, and instantly get higher-ed-validated activity ideas, active learning strategies, and session wrappers. I couldn't find it. So I built it.