The university has set an end of semester course evaluation called the SOS (Student Opinion Scores). While this can be helpful information, it is obviously too late to make any changes for this semesters' students.
An alternative that we favor is a series of short questions delivered to students at 2-3 weeks into the course and, perhaps at the 8-10 week point. The questions we recommend are:
- What is helping you learn in this course?
- What is hindering your learning in this course?
- What changes in the course would improve your ability to learn?
The questions must be anonymous to be effective. One method of creating an easy to use online version of this questionnaire is by using Blackboard’s Survey Feature. It looks and acts just like a quiz in Blackboard, but it does not tie the answer to a student’s name.
After looking at the results, assemble and share with students. “These are the things that you say are helping – we will continue doing them. These are the things that would help you learn better, we can change two of them, so this is how the rest of the semester will be changed.” You and your students are now partners in their learning!
Confidential, Periodic Feedback :: Resources
Videos
Top Three Reasons to do a Midterm Course Evaluation
Listen to Ireta Ekstrom’s top three reasons for doing a midterm course evaluation in this five-minute video. Discover why evaluations are a good idea and learn some tips and methods for gathering the data you need to move forward in the course with confidence.
Evaluating Hybrid Courses - Video coming soon!
In this video John Coaster describes ways to think about and evaluate your hybrid course. Included in this video are considerations pertaining to developing your hybrid course, communication with and between students, and ways to think about the effectiveness of the course.
Websites
Feedback from students can be done at any point in the semester. Many faculty use the Student Opinion Surveys (SOS), but information from those forms is not intended to give you feedback for the current semester. The following website has literally hundreds of questions you could use to obtain feedback from your students.
Books
Brookfield, S. D. (1995). Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.
Lewis, K. (2001). Using midsemester student feedback and responding to it. In Lewis (Ed.), Techniques and Strategies for Interpreting Student Evaluations, pp. 33–34. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Tools
Survey Tool
For instructions to create a survey,
click here.