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Best questions for online course student survey about course difficulty

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Adam Sabla

·

Aug 21, 2025

Create your survey

Here are some of the best questions for an online course student survey about course difficulty, plus tips for crafting your own. If you want to capture rich insights, Specific can help you build such a survey in seconds.

The best open-ended questions for course difficulty feedback

Open-ended questions let students share their unique experiences in their own words, uncovering insights you’d never get from a static list. We like these for revealing context around pain points, motivation, and learning outcomes—and they’re best used when you’re after honest, thoughtful feedback on course challenges and improvements.

  1. What was the most challenging part of this course for you? Why?

  2. Can you describe any moments where you struggled to keep up with the material?

  3. Which topics felt too complex or confusing, and how did you deal with them?

  4. Were there any assignments or concepts that you felt needed more explanation?

  5. How did the pace of the course work for you? Were some sections rushed or slow?

  6. Why did you choose to stick with or drop out of certain modules?

  7. What resources or support helped you push through challenging sections?

  8. In your opinion, what would make this course easier to complete successfully?

  9. Can you share an example of when you felt motivated (or discouraged) by the course difficulty?

  10. What’s one piece of advice you’d give future students about tackling this course?

Open-ended feedback is especially powerful for identifying perceived obstacles and understanding why some students thrive while others disengage. Fun fact: MOOCs typically have completion rates as low as 5–15%, whereas cohort-based courses focusing on community and interaction can reach over 85% completion rates. This dramatic difference underscores the value of listening to student experiences and making iterative improvements. [1][2]

Best single-select multiple-choice questions for course difficulty

Single-select multiple-choice questions shine when you want to quickly quantify responses or remove ambiguity—especially at scale. They’re also great conversation starters. If someone picks an answer that stands out (like “Too difficult”), you can immediately prompt a follow-up, making it easier for students to share rather than composing a narrative themselves.

Question: How would you rate the overall difficulty of this course?

  • Much easier than I expected

  • Somewhat easier than I expected

  • About what I expected

  • Somewhat harder than I expected

  • Much harder than I expected

Question: Which section or module did you find the most difficult?

  • Module 1: Foundations

  • Module 2: Intermediate Concepts

  • Module 3: Advanced Applications

  • I did not find any section difficult

  • Other

Question: Did you ever consider dropping out or skipping parts of the course due to difficulty?

  • No, I completed every part

  • Yes, I skipped a few sections

  • Yes, I almost quit entirely

When to follow up with "why?" If a student rates the course as "Much harder than I expected," always ask why. This one word can turn a generic answer into actionable insight. For instance, "Which topics felt overwhelming?" or "What specifically made Module 2 challenging for you?"

When and why to add the "Other" choice? "Other" is essential when there’s a chance your answer set might not cover every real situation. Follow up by asking the student to specify. You’d be surprised how often unexpected themes emerge, fueling future course improvements.

NPS questions: Should you ask online course students?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a proven method for measuring student loyalty and word-of-mouth potential. For something as personal as course difficulty, it lets you gauge not just satisfaction but how course challenges affect willingness to recommend your program to peers. The NPS question is:

“How likely are you to recommend this course to a friend or colleague?” (0–10 scale)

Followed by: “What’s the main reason for your score?”

If you want a done-for-you NPS survey tailored to this use case, you can generate one right now: NPS survey for online course students.

The power of follow-up questions

Follow-up questions dramatically increase the clarity and depth of your survey responses. A study of over 600 participants found that conversational surveys driven by AI not only boost engagement but yield higher quality data compared to traditional online forms. [3] That’s why Specific’s AI follow-up questions feature is a game changer—it lets you dig deeper, clarifying vague responses and surfacing the true “why" behind student struggles.

  • Student: "The assignments were difficult."

  • AI follow-up: "Were there specific types of assignments that stood out as especially challenging? How did you approach them?"

How many followups to ask? In our experience, two to three follow-ups are enough to get to the heart of the matter. The beauty is you can set a maximum number of follow-ups, and even allow the respondent to move on once they’ve shared enough. Specific lets you adjust this easily for every survey.

This makes it a conversational survey—students respond naturally, as if they’re chatting with a knowledgeable peer, not just clicking checkboxes.

AI response analysis is easy. Even with lots of open text, AI tools can summarize themes and trends quickly. See how to analyze survey responses with AI in seconds.

These automated follow-up questions are a new paradigm in feedback collection—if you haven’t tried one, generate a survey and see for yourself.

How to prompt ChatGPT for great course difficulty questions

Want to brainstorm your own questions with AI? Here’s how to prompt ChatGPT or another GPT-based tool. You’ll get better results the more context you include—about your teaching goals, course structure, and audience.

Start with this:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for online course student survey about course difficulty.

If you give the AI more background, you’ll get better, on-point questions:

Our course is a 6-week online program focused on data science basics. We’re trying to understand where students are struggling with the material, and how to improve completion rates. Suggest 10 open-ended questions for our survey.

Once you have a list, ask for organization:

Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.

Next, focus on the areas you care most about. For example:

Generate 10 questions for the category "Assignments & Assessments".

This layered approach results in richer, more actionable survey content.

What is a conversational survey?

Conversational surveys recreate the give-and-take of a real discussion, unlike traditional static forms. You ask, your students reply, and the survey naturally branches based on what’s said—guided every step of the way by AI. This leads to more complete feedback, higher engagement, and data that tells the full story.

Manual Survey Creation

AI-Powered Survey (Conversational)

Time-consuming to write and update questions

Quickly generated, AI suggests the best phrasing

No real-time "why?" or dig-deeper logic

Automated, relevant follow-ups based on responses

Hard to analyze lots of open text replies

Built-in AI summarizes and finds patterns instantly

Impersonal and easy to skip

Feels like messaging with a real expert, high engagement

Why use AI for online course student surveys? AI-powered surveys not only save time but actually improve the quality of your feedback. You can instantly adapt your questions to student responses, unlocking the nuance behind their struggles and successes. To get started, try the Specific survey generator. Want a step-by-step approach? Here’s our guide on how to create an online course student survey about course difficulty.

With Specific, you’ll experience what best-in-class conversational surveys feel like—intuitive for creators and truly engaging for respondents. AI survey examples generated on the platform capture feedback you can actually use.

See this course difficulty survey example now

Step into the future of student feedback—see a course difficulty AI survey example and discover how conversational surveys can surface deeper insights, faster and more naturally, than any form-based poll.

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Try it out. It's fun!

Sources

  1. digitallearningedge.com. Typical completion rates of MOOCs (5–15%)

  2. edsurge.com. Cohort-based courses and 85%+ completion rates

  3. arxiv.org. Field study on conversational surveys and improved engagement

Adam Sabla - Image Avatar

Adam Sabla

Adam Sabla is an entrepreneur with experience building startups that serve over 1M customers, including Disney, Netflix, and BBC, with a strong passion for automation.

Adam Sabla

Adam Sabla is an entrepreneur with experience building startups that serve over 1M customers, including Disney, Netflix, and BBC, with a strong passion for automation.

Adam Sabla

Adam Sabla is an entrepreneur with experience building startups that serve over 1M customers, including Disney, Netflix, and BBC, with a strong passion for automation.