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

( categories: teknoids )
Submitted by jmayer on Tue, 05/20/2008 - 3:25pm.

I have barely been paying attention to this thread, but now I am intrigued....

What is it that you (that's the institutional "you") hope to
accomplish by getting 90-100% response rates on a 10 minute survey
from your students? You really can't get too much substantive
information or any deep values information in 10 minutes (IMHO) and
you can probably predict within 10% the answer to any question on a
course evaluation form what students will say by asking any 3 random
students...

1 will say they loved the teacher the course
1 will say they hated his ties
1 will say everything was "fine"

Ok, that's pretty weak, but do you see what I am getting at? Do you
(again, the institution) want student feedback to confirm that your
faculty are teaching? ... that faculty are "good" teachers? that
students are happy? ... that there is something that you could be
doing to make them happier? I am honestly curious.

John

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 2:28 PM, Dirk van Assendelft wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
>
>
>
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> !SIG:48332180131653278346283!