Best practice ways to obtain feedback from the learner on your course?

Hi Brooke and welcome to the community!

Personally, I like a mix of multiple choice/Likert scale questions and a few open-ended ones. The multiple choice/Likert scale questions give you consistent kinds of answers that make it easier to see trends and easily compare feedback from multiple learners. But since those kinds of questions only give you a shallow look at people's feelings, I like including a few open-ended questions to dig deeper into areas of the course that worked well for them or could have been better.

Beyond that, I also like to make sure:

• The whole feedback survey is as short as possible while still giving me useful answers. Learners are usually more likely to fill out feedback surveys if they don't seem like they'll take too long.
• I use only a few open feedback questions and only for things where the answer is likely to be very helpful. Open-ended questions take longer to fill out than multiple choice, so when learners see a bunch of them they'll often assume the survey will take a long time to fill out. So I use them sparingly.

On a related note, for larger learning initiatives it can be interesting to re-survey learners a while after they completed the course/program to see what stuck with them and what information they've found most useful on the job.