On Friday afternoon, I was confused about what to do on the weekend. I wanted to go to class to recharge my batteries and go out to play with my children, so I made an appointment with some friends to see what they were going to do on the weekend. As a result, most of my friends replied that I would spend time with my baby at home on Saturday. I feel like I haven't been with my children for a long time, and the final exam has just ended. It is time to play with them. But where to go? So we had a small family meeting to choose between mountain climbing, seaside hiking and outdoor picnic. Finally, the seaside hiking won, so on Saturday we drove our children to the seaside plank road for hiking.

Looking back on the whole process, isn't this the interview and questionnaire process that the lecturer needs to go through when determining the course? Asking friends how to spend the weekend is like determining the course direction through interviews and letting family members vote on the final activities, just like defining the specific teaching content through questionnaires. What's the difference between them?

First, the target groups are different.

The target group of the interview is the possible teaching group of our course. They may not be the people who will attend our course, but they must have the same needs as those who will attend our course.

The target group of the questionnaire is the students who will take our courses next.

For example, if you want to develop a cross-departmental communication course, you must first find people who have cross-departmental communication needs. These people may be your colleagues or friends. Colleagues may attend your class, but friends will not. But they will encounter their own pain points in cross-departmental communication, and this pain point is exactly what we need to solve. Therefore, if you want to solve the pain, you must know who is "sick".

There are also teachers who want to develop parenting education courses. First of all, it is necessary to make clear which age of parenting education this parenting education is to solve. If you are good at parenting education for children aged 0-3, then we must find parents of children aged 0-3 to interview, not just parents. In other words, you can't find the parents of children who want to take the college entrance examination to ask TA's children what is the confusion at the age of 0-3. First, ta may have forgotten it for too long. But will parents with children aged 0-3 definitely attend your class? Obviously not necessarily.

But if our curriculum has defined the theme of the course, then we should send a questionnaire to the parents who are about to attend the class to clarify what problems we need to help these parents solve.

Second, there are different ways to ask questions.

Interviews need to be conducted by telephone or face-to-face questions. The content of the interview is planned in advance, with general directions and open-ended questions. The interview is also very flexible. We need to constantly adjust our questions according to the respondents' answers, so as to dig deep into the "pain point". For example, we can ask a few more questions: What else? So what? So what prompted the interviewee to communicate more in the interview process, we only need the best guidance, record and summary.

The questionnaire is relatively standardized. The topics of the questionnaire are already set by us, and most of them are uncertain multiple-choice questions. There are only 1 to 2 open-ended questions, and we will find that although there are open-ended questions, the answers obtained by recycling questionnaires are mostly "none".

Third, the ultimate goal is different.

The purpose of the interview is to determine the teaching direction for the course we want to develop.

The purpose of the questionnaire is to help our course determine the teaching content.

For example, some of our teachers teach time management courses, but time management involves a lot. Making an annual plan is time management, so is how to prioritize things, or how to use the tomato clock to concentrate on things. So what are we going to talk about? This needs to be determined through interviews after we define the teaching group.

The questionnaire is after determining the course direction. If you want to know how to solve the time management in a certain scene or how to arrange the priority among many methods, you must determine it by sending a questionnaire to the students who want to attend the class. This is also what we need to do in the course design, taking students as the center, not lecturers as the center.

To sum up, the difference between interview and questionnaire is that the target group is different, the way of asking questions is different, and the ultimate goal is different. In other words, if you want to do a good interview, you must first make clear your teaching group, then get more effective information by telephone or face-to-face open questions, and finally get the course direction you want to develop through induction and summary.