Create your survey

Create your survey

Create your survey

Best questions for online course student survey about practice exercise quality

Adam Sabla - Image Avatar

Adam Sabla

·

Aug 21, 2025

Create your survey

Here are some of the best questions for an online course student survey about practice exercise quality, plus tips on crafting them strategically. You can build a tailored survey in seconds with Specific, making it easy to get actionable insights from your students.

Best open-ended questions for online course student survey about practice exercise quality

Open-ended questions invite students to share their thoughts freely, capturing the story behind their experience rather than just a score or a checkbox. We find these questions invaluable when you need richer, more nuanced feedback or want to uncover issues that rigid options might miss. In fact, there’s compelling evidence: a Danish study observed that 76% of patients added comments to open-ended fields, and 80.7% of management teams rated these as useful or very useful for improvement [1]. In course feedback, open-ended items help you spot trends you didn’t foresee and get to the root of student challenges.

  1. What aspects of the practice exercises did you find most helpful for your learning?

  2. Where did you feel confused or stuck while working through the practice exercises?

  3. Can you describe a moment when an exercise really “clicked” for you or helped clarify the course material?

  4. Are there specific topics you’d like to see more (or different) practice exercises for?

  5. How would you improve the instructions or guidance provided with the exercises?

  6. What’s one thing that could make the practice exercises more engaging or motivating?

  7. Were there any exercises you felt were too easy or too difficult? Tell us more.

  8. How well do the exercises relate to real-world scenarios or your goals?

  9. What support or resources would have helped you complete the exercises more effectively?

  10. Is there anything else you’d like to share about your experience with the practice exercises?

While open-ended questions enrich your survey data, be aware that they invite more skipped responses—one Pew Research Center study found their nonresponse rate averages around 18%, far higher than closed-ended questions [2]. Still, the insights you gain often outweigh this trade-off, especially when analyzed with AI tools.

Best single-select multiple-choice questions for online course student survey about practice exercise quality

Single-select multiple-choice questions shine when you want to measure specific metrics, compare across groups, or quickly “start the conversation.” For many students, picking a response from a list is easier than crafting a detailed narrative, especially if they’re short on time. These close-ended questions are great for quantifying trends and can direct AI or follow-up questions to dive deeper on interesting responses.

Question: How would you rate the overall quality of the practice exercises?

  • Excellent

  • Good

  • Fair

  • Poor

Question: How challenging did you find the practice exercises?

  • Too easy

  • Just right

  • Too difficult

  • Other

Question: How well did the exercises reinforce what you learned in the lessons?

  • Very well

  • Somewhat

  • Not much

  • Not at all

When to followup with “why?” Use a follow-up “why?” when you see a selection but want the reasoning behind it. For example, if many students rate the exercises as “Too difficult,” ask: “What made these exercises feel too difficult for you?” This uncovers actionable detail that numbers alone won’t give you.

When and why to add the “Other” choice? Use “Other” when you expect some students’ experiences may not fit your listed options. Their follow-up explanations can reveal unique perspectives or issues you hadn’t considered—essential for continuous improvement.

Should you use an NPS-style question for practice exercise feedback?

NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a gold standard for measuring overall loyalty—even for course components like practice exercises. By asking, “How likely are you to recommend these exercises to another student?” on a 0-10 scale, you capture an actionable, benchmarkable sentiment. This can shine a light on both your strongest advocates and your most frustrated students, helping you prioritize improvements. If you want a ready-made NPS survey for this context, you can generate one instantly using Specific’s survey builder.

The power of follow-up questions

Follow-up questions are the engine of conversational surveys. Instead of collecting shallow, ambiguous answers, they dig for specifics, uncover root causes, and clarify vague feedback. We built Specific to deploy AI-powered follow-ups that feel natural and context-aware, inspired by how expert interviewers converse. This dynamic, real-time adaptation means richer data—with less back-and-forth over email or missed understanding.

According to research, mixing open-ended and closed-ended questions increases survey predictive power by 27%, precisely because it lets you probe deeper when you spot something unusual [4]. Want to see how automated follow-ups work? Check our feature overview.

  • Student: “Some exercises were confusing.”

  • AI follow-up: “Can you tell me which exercises you found confusing and what made them unclear?”

How many followups to ask? Usually, 2-3 targeted follow-ups are enough to extract meaningful context without fatiguing the respondent. Ideally, set a limit and let the conversation skip ahead once you’ve got what you need. Specific lets you easily define this logic to balance insight depth with a smooth experience.

This makes it a conversational survey—respondents feel like they’re having a real dialogue, not filling out a boring form. That’s how you get honest, thoughtful feedback instead of one-word answers.

AI response analysis: Even with all this rich, unstructured text, AI makes it effortless to analyze responses and discover trends. See our guide on response analysis here.

Give it a try in Specific: generate a survey, test out smart follow-ups, and see how conversational feedback feels so much more human.

How to prompt ChatGPT or other GPTs for questions about practice exercises

If you’re creating your own survey, you can coach ChatGPT or any GPT-based tool to design great feedback questions. Start simple—then add depth:

First, get a batch of open-ended questions:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for Online Course Student survey about Practice Exercise Quality.

AI works better when it understands your context. Provide details about your role, your course, and your goal, for sharper questions:

I'm an online course instructor aiming to improve the quality and impact of my course's practice exercises. The course is aimed at adult learners who are new to programming. Generate 10 open-ended survey questions to understand students' experience with the practice exercises, uncover specific pain points, and collect suggestions for improvement.

After that, organize the output for easy review:

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

Finally, select your most interesting categories (e.g., “challenge,” “real-world relevance,” “clarity of instructions”) and dig deeper:

Generate 10 questions for categories real-world relevance and clarity of instructions.

What is a conversational survey?

A conversational survey is exactly what it sounds like—a two-way, dynamic interaction (powered by AI, in our case) that mimics a real conversation. Instead of static, one-size-fits-all forms, each question adapts to previous answers, probing and clarifying for deeper context. This makes giving feedback less of a chore and more of a meaningful dialogue—right from inside your online course or on a sharable landing page.

A traditional survey might ask a list of fixed questions and collect generic answers, often missing “why” behind the responses. An AI survey generator like Specific can instantly design smart, tailored questions, handle dynamic follow-ups, and interpret complex, open-ended data for you. Here’s a quick comparison:

Manual Survey Creation

AI Survey Generation (Conversational)

Static list of questions

Adaptive questions & real-time follow-ups

Manual data review & analysis

Instant AI-driven insights & summaries

Hard to scale or localize

Easy to launch in any language

Feels like paperwork

Feels like a chat conversation

Why use AI for online course student surveys? Because it dramatically improves participation, collects richer feedback, and saves you hours of manual analysis—all while providing the context you need to make real improvements. If you want, you can start with a practice exercise quality AI survey example, or follow a step-by-step guide.

Specific’s conversational surveys make this process seamless and engaging for both students and instructors—whether you’re building from scratch or tweaking an expert template. The instant, chat-based experience helps respondents open up, resulting in the kind of feedback you actually want.

See this practice exercise quality survey example now

Get instant, actionable student feedback with AI-powered conversational surveys—uncover what’s working, improve fast, and make your course stand out. See how easy it is to generate and analyze your own survey today.

Create your survey

Try it out. It's fun!

Sources

  1. PubMed (BMC Health Services Research). Patient-reported incident reporting in Danish hospitals: utility of open-ended survey responses

  2. Pew Research Center. Why do some open-ended survey questions result in higher item nonresponse rates than others?

  3. SoPact Social Impact Measurement University. Open-ended vs closed-ended survey questions: advantages and disadvantages

  4. Thematic. Why use open-ended questions in surveys?

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.