Educational Policy Committee members describe course evaluation process

 

At the end of each semester, students are given the opportunity to evaluate courses' strengths and weaknesses using student evaluation forms, provided by the Educational Policy Committee (EPC).

According to its website, the EPC aims to "initiate, receive, review, and enact policies or recommend proposed changes of educational policies... that have direct bearing on the broad patterns of education."

Anne Mahoney, chair of the EPC and lecturer in the Department of Classics, said the EPC is currently focused on improving evaluation response rates by raising student awareness and improving the evaluation form. 

In addition, the EPC subcommittee on student course evaluations, led by earth and ocean sciences professor Jack Ridge, has been working with others to convert the student evaluation process from the old paper form to its current online equivalent, as well as convert the questionnaire for the evaluation. The subcommittee, organized to design this new questionnaire and move it online, was dissolved after it completed this work a few years ago.

Mahoney remarked that, in terms of collecting responses, paper evaluations are far more effective since they are distributed and completed in class. 

“It was sort of mandatory, but individual students still don’t have to fill it in,” Mahoney said. “There are supposed way[s] that we could make course evaluation mandatory, but I’m just not sure if that would be useful.”

Though useful, paper forms, Ridge explained, are not convenient for managing data.

“[Paper forms] went to a machine that was from the 1970s that scanned them and put out the results,” Ridge said. “And we only have one of them. It did not work particularly well, and if it crashed, the whole system [would] come to an end.”

The committee, therefore, decided that going online might be a better alternative.

Currently, student evaluation results are only visible to faculty members, as student course evaluations are intended to be a tool to help staff improve their teaching, Ridge said. Mahoney, however, thinks that evaluation results could help students make more informed choices when selecting courses.

“We certainly don’t want students to go on certain random other websites that provide no useful information,” Mahoney said. “You get no guarantee that the information comes from somebody that actually knows anything. It’s hard to filter out what's real and what isn’t.”

Mahoney explained that the results could act as a sort of proxy for the traditional method of gathering information about classes -- talking to upperclassmen and other students who have taken the course before.

“We should continue to [foster connections between underclassmen and upperclassmen], but more information is never a bad thing,” Mahoney said.

Currently, the EPC is pushing to make evaluation results visible to students by compiling and publishing the numerical poll results of non-written response questions, according to EPC's 2014-2015 Annual Report. This campaign was proposed by the EPC but has yet to be put to faculty vote, which will determine the final call about whether students will be allowed to view evaluation results. 

Ridge said some faculty are rightly concerned about publishing results online.

“Evaluation from students is like putting a score on the professor’s teaching,” Ridge said. “Would you want your score to be published [publicly]?”

Aside from taking tips from course evaluations, professors can also learn strategies to improve, design or redesign courses by visiting the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT), which offers a popular Course Design Institute program twice a year. 

According to Donna Qualters, the director of CELT, there is usually a waiting list of faculty members for the Course Design Institute since it only accepts a limited number of participants. During the program, participating faculty gather together to review their courses and discuss how to create a better teaching and learning environment.