Question re online course evaluations

Submitted by slamar on Tue, 05/20/2008 - 11:50am.

I asked recently about experiences people have had with doing online
course evaluations, and didn't receive any answers.

Is anyone at all having students evaluate profs this way, or did my
question just get upstaged by the funny cat video?

We have a program that ought to replace the paper evaluations done during
the last class, but are wondering how to get students to sign on. We are
thinking the only practical way would be to hold their grades until they
evaluate the course. Any opinions even if you haven't actually tried
this?

Thanks,

Sandy Lamar
Computer Services Reference Librarian
New England School of Law
154 Stuart St.
Boston, MA 02116
slamar@nesl.edu
617-422-7331

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RE: Question re online course evaluations
Submitted by dva on Tue, 05/20/2008 - 1:30pm.

We did a pilot program for doing course evaluations online this spring
term. The highest participation rate we got was 100% , but there were
only two students in that class. Participation rates were as low as
10%, most were 45-55%, some were as high as 75%. The paper evaluation
process typically got a 90% participation rate.

Overall, we were very disappointed with the response rate. We are
brainstorming now to figure out how to increase the participation, but
fear the being too draconian may lead to useless survey results. I
would be interested to see how others fare....

By the way, our app is written in-house. A student logs in with their
active directory credentials, sees a list of the classes they are
enrolled in, and can then select a survey to take. Once a student has
taken the survey, they cannot go back and take it again.

Dirk van Assendelft
Director of Technology Services
Washington and Lee School of Law

540-458-8582
dva@wlu.edu

>>> "Birch, Paul" 5/20/2008 3:00 PM >>>
We do the 10-15 minutes at the end of class thing with an online form
(devised, I believe, by somebody across campus), and also advise the
students that they can login and do it at a later time if they prefer.
I don't know if the wait-until-later option factored in, but I was
surprised at the low response rate (< 50%) this past semester among
students in the course I taught. I chalk this up to "If you can't say
anything nice..." My own intuition is that an over-strict policy of
mandatory responses could significantly pollute the results.

Paul

From: teknoids-bounces@ruckus.law.cornell.edu
[mailto:teknoids-bounces@ruckus.law.cornell.edu] On Behalf Of Seibel,
Robert
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2008 1:51 PM
To: Teknoids
Subject: RE: [teknoids] Question re online course evaluations

I don't know anything about the technology involved, but this sounds
like a good idea. Why not just give the students the same 10 or 15
minutes in class to complete the evaluation, but have them use their
laptops to log on and complete them on line. You may not get 100% but
you never really get 100% completion of the paper evaluations either.
I
don't know that you need a more draconian penalty to enforce
completion,
at least for standard larger classes.

You could give students the choice of completing the eval on line or
on
paper, but then you would have to have someone enter the paper data
into
the same database--this would be important if there are a significant
number of students in the class who don't have laptops to bring to
class.

Bob Seibel

California Western School of Law

rfs@cwsl.edu

619 525 1445

________________________________

!SIG:48332180131653278346283!

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