Why Ongoing Teaching Evaluations Matter, and What I Plan to Do About Them

An article from Faculty Focus titled Using Multiple Course Evaluations to Engage and Empower Your Students and Yourself has really gotten me thinking. When I started teaching at the graduate level, I used a mid-semester evaluation to gauge the course. I used a format that a colleague shared with me, which ended up being more detailed than the departmental end-of-course evaluation. As someone who was just starting out, I wanted detailed feedback on my teaching and the course. For each item, students were asked to rate the course or me on a scale, as well as offer comments.  What I saw on completed evaluations were hastily circled numbers for the scale measures and few comments.  This could explain why this practice has not endured for me.

The article from Faculty Focus brings out a lot of great pointers for ongoing course evaluations. Rather than summarize the article that is linked in the first sentence of this blog post, I am focusing on my plans for implementing ongoing course evaluations, for both face-to-face and online courses.  The difference is that face-to-face courses run for 14 weeks, while online courses run in an accelerated 7 week format.

First up: what questions to ask? I really like the open-ended questions suggested in the Faculty Focus article:

1. What is one thing you like about this course (so far)?
2. What is one thing you do not like about this course (so far)?
3. What is one thing that could be improved in this course?
4. Do you have any additional comments you would like to share?

I might also include a couple of Likert scale questions:

1. On a scale of 1 (worst) to 10 (best) how would you rate this course (so far)?
2. On a scale of 1 (worst) to 10 (best) how would you rate your learning in this course (so far)?

For both instructional formats (face to face and online), I will use our CMS (course management system). We use Moodle as our CMS, which allows for anonymous responses to feedback items. For this first go-round, I am not setting conditions in the CMS requiring completion of the feedback evaluations. Part of the reason actually stems from issues in the CMS, rather than a philosopical reason. If I set conditions on assignments or other items that follow an evaluation, students would be unable to access the items until the evaluation is completed. This poses a problem, as I encourage students to think ahead, rather than scrambling one class session at a time.

Following the completion of each evaluation (one after every 4-5 class sessions), I will provide a summary of the feedback to the students, and address any concerns that are raised. In so doing, my aim is to demonstrate the importance of reporting results and planned actions that come out of assessment activities.

I am excited to institute this slimmed-down version of ongoing course evaluation. I am also creating a similar approach to peer-evaluation of team-based assignments, as well as self-evaluation. But, the plans for those approaches will have to be a post for another day.