Online%20Course%20Evaluations:%20Lessons%20Learned

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Online Course Evaluations Lessons Learned

• With a cast of thousands, including Susan
  Monsen, W. Ken Woo, Carrie Mahan Groce, Wayne
  Miller

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Online Course Evaluations Lessons Learned

• Susan Monsen

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Yale Law Experience

• Course Evaluations were run by Student
  Representatives
• Introduced first online system 2001
• Changed system twice and introduced incentives
• For Spring 2005 have 90 response rate

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YLS OCE Version 1

• First online course evaluation (OCE) Fall
  2001-Spring 2003
• Home grown web application with 18 questions
• System did not scale for in-class completion
• General email reminders sent to all students
• No incentives
• Response rate less than 20

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Back to Paper

• Returned to Paper after 3 semesters use
• Reasons
• Low response rate
• Wanted an easier to use interface for completing
  and viewing results
• Wanted ability to add incentives

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OCE Version 2Design

• Design with input from student representatives
  and faculty
• Modeled after Yale College system
• Reduced the number of questions to 8
• Added a comment question
• Students with evaluations to complete received
  weekly email reminder

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Incentives

• Tested Class Time for Completion
• Worked for small-midsize classes
• Response rate about 90
• Load testing indicated up to 75 simultaneous
  users.
• Introduced Grade Blocking
• Students see an instead of grade for those
  classes not evaluated.

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OCE 2 Results View
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Response Rate by System
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OCE 2 Response Rates
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What did we learn

• Dont
• Too many questions
• No automated reminders
• No incentives
• Do
• Incentives work!
• Reminders help
• Load test system

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CTEs Online

• Presented by
• Ken Woo
• Director, Law School Computing
• Northwestern University School of Law

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When?

• 1st Semester Spring 2004
• 2nd Semester Fall 2005
• 3rd Semester Spring 2005
• Only 1.5 years into it Online

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When? (continued)

• Paper system Fall 2003 80
• Paper system Spring 2003 77
• Paper system Fall 2004 70
• 1st Semester Spring 2004 N/A
• 2nd Semester Fall 2005 70
• 3rd Semester Spring 2005 67.8

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Why?

• Wanted to push everything onto the Web.
• Everyone had some sort of web access
• Loose papers and go paperless
• Centralized storage location
• On a centralized server
• No Data Steward available
• Access by Registrar and Registrar Team only
• Professors can view own results

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Why? (continued)

• Perceived as easier to manage
• Changes were easier for Registrar
• 3 types of forms
• Standard (19 questions)
• CLR (23 questions)
• Clinic (18 questions)
• Legibility was a small issue

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Lessons Learned

• Very similar to paper questions with some added
  questions for clarity
• Participation rate is falling
• Some ideas to increase participation
• Withhold transcripts no
• Withhold final grades no
• Let know, no view of any results if no
  participation next semester Fall 06

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Q A

• CTEs Online Presented by
• Ken Woo
• Director, Law School Computing
• Northwestern University School of Law

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Online Course Evaluations Lessons Learned

• Carrie Mahan Groce

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• Why Online Evaluations
• Academic Dean was the instigator. Wanted better,
  more timely, access to evaluations, particularly
  comments.
• Hoped to get more meaningful written comments,
  both good and bad.
• Our school has a culture of use of written
  comments by students and search committees.

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• Web Manager built homegrown Cold Fusion
  application using current evaluation form and
  procedures as a start.
• Data pulled from administrative (Banner) system.
• Course and student data stored in one database,
  results in a separate db (anonymity).
• Questions generate dynamically.

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• Initial concerns taken into account.
• Faculty - only registered students, one per
  student. No evaluation after exam.
• Students retain anonymity, no faculty access
  before grades.
• Additional Student Concern
• Complained this format would be too time
  consuming not addressed, later feedback
  suggests students appreciate freeing up class
  time.

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• Additional Faculty Concerns how addressed
• Lower response rates pilot conducted to get a
  feel for response rates before faculty approval
  of online evals.
• Concern that comments would be too accessible
  leaving less popular professors vulnerable
  agreed that Academic Dean could remove very
  negative comments from public view.
• Not all courses followed standard exam schedule
  handled case by case.

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• Assoc. Dean wanted data to take to faculty came
  to Ed. Tech.
• Started with pilot group in Fall 02 7 profs, 10
  course participated.
• Spring 03 all adjuncts and a handful of appointed
  faculty 80 courses in all
• Summer 03 all courses participated.

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• Evaluation Procedures
• Evaluation goes online 2 weeks prior to semester
  end available through the day prior to exams
  beginning. Originally only last two weeks of
  class extended during 1st pilot.
• Students receive emails with links to all their
  course evaluations and detailed instructions.
• Reminder emails sent every other day or so to
  those who have not completed.

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• Results from pilots encouraging. Response rates
  good (higher than paper), though inflated due to
  incentives and babysitting.
• Summer low but very short evaluation period.
• Dean took data to faculty for approval to move
  all courses online. Approval given beginning Fall
  2003.

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• Response Rates - real use setting

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• Reasons for drop in response rates - speculation
• Change of Academic Dean. Current dean not
  invested, less hands on encouragement.
• Novelty wearing off. This year we had our first
  incoming class who never did a paper evaluation.
  No novelty factor just another chore.

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• What should we do?
• Nothing? Assessment department happy with 70 and
  we are getting better rates than other divisions.
• My preference get the new dean back on board,
  even more reminders, advertisement.
• Better communication to faculty about timing so
  they can tell students what to expect.

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• Next steps
• More sophisticated results generation. Advanced
  searching ability to compare profs side by side,
  show all evals for a professor or a course.
• Streamline course list interaction. Build direct
  access to Banner system rather than pulling data
  out of the admin system. Not likely to happen.
• Move from Access back-end to SQL Server.

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• Potholes to watch out for.
• Difficult to know how good the data is. We
  realized late that the person pulling lists
  didnt have permissions to get non-law students
  enrolled in law classes. No way to know that from
  looking at such large amounts of data. 150
  courses/nearly 5000 individual evaluations.
• Different schedules for different courses can
  cause headaches. 1st year Legal Writing wanted
  complete control over timing. Some courses finish
  early. Hard to keep those in institutional
  memory. Anytime an individual eval has a
  different schedule response lower.

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• Potholes (cont.)
• Complete anonymity made a few instances of
  students filling out one evaluation as though it
  was for a different professor tedious. Mostly
  resolved by adding the professors name
  throughout the text of the eval, in as many
  places as possible.
• Students want to retract an evaluation (usually
  negative). This semester was the first time we
  heard this request. Academic dean turned down all
  requests and shut the door to additional requests.

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• And a sink hole
• A more pervasive problem with any ed tech
  project, once we do something it becomes ours.
• Problematic because we dont have the staff to
  take on administrative functions, nor have we
  been given the power to handle issues with those
  functions.

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• Remedies?
• Proactive never take too much control of a
  project. Build as much administrative
  functionality in as possible at the beginning.
• If youve taken on too much - give it back, if it
  was their job before it was online, it should
  still be their job.
• Easier said than done.

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University of DenverSturm COL Experience

• Final words of wisdom
• Dont try to reinvent the wheel. We found we had
  better buy-in when we agreed to keep system as
  close to original as possible.

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Contact information
Carrie Mahan Groce Web Manager University of
Denver Sturm College of Law cmgroce_at_law.du.edu 30
3.871.6098
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Online Course Evaluations Lessons Learned

• Wayne Miller

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The Duke Law Experience

• Introduced Summer 2003 without much planning when
  scantron equipment failed and replacement was
  deemed too expensive
• My motivation was to provide a service to the law
  school that would benefit all more efficient for
  staff and students unmediated access for
  faculty better community access to public
  information (summaries)

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The Duke Law Experience

• Homegrown, PHP-based survey software was employed
• Student Information System provided rosters
• Local email system provided authentication
  (through LDAP) for both students and faculty

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Shortsightedness.

• Paper form was copied without re-evaluation
• 10 minutes for in-class completion of paper
  evaluations was given back to faculty
• Incentives for students were not thought through

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Click the radio button is awkward at best
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Scale changes are very problematic
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Things we designed right

• Registrar has direct control over which classes
  are included which faculty are associated with
  each class etc.

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Things we designed right

• Students can submit conditional evaluations
  when they fail to log in correctly or are not in
  our roster

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Things people want

• Students want to be able to edit and save, and
  come back to evaluations
• Registrar and some faculty members want
  individualized time windows for certain classes

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Student Response Rate

• 70 response rate required to share course eval
  summaries with community
• Students need constant cajoling or we need to
  provide a better incentive
• Some faculty are apprehensive about including
  students who would not have been in attendance on
  day of paper evaluations, and uneasy about
  cajoled students

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Student Response Rate
Semester Total Response Rate Percentage of Class/Instr Making Cutoff
Fall 2003 66 (extended into exam period) 24/82 29
Spring 2004 60 36/119 30
Fall 2004 52 8/93 8
Spring 2005 67 (dropped non-law students) 48/117 41
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Student Response Rate
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Student Response Rate
Time scheduled for evals in large classes
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Student Response Rate
Automated and person-specific email from
Associate Dean
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Student Response Rate
Second automatic email from Associate Dean and
cajoling email from Registrar
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Incentives under consideration

• Withhold registration for following semester
• Withhold grades
• Withhold free printing
• Withhold firstborn.

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Issues

• Security not discussed much, but was a big part
  of planning
• Privacy deal breaker for some students
  responses are anonymized before release
• Accuracy faculty are suspicious of mix-ups
  varying scales have confused students
• Urban legends stories abound among faculty
  about how Prof X saw everyones evaluations, etc.

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Future

• Evaluation form is being reworked easier to fill
  out, less confusing
• Incentives are being considered
• Scantron on/off-line solutions are being weighed
• Support could at any point be withdrawn
• And probably would have been, were another
  solution easy to implement.

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Contact information
Wayne Miller Director of Educational
Technologies Duke University School of
Law wmiller_at_law.duke.edu 919-613-7243 http//edt
ech.law.duke.edu/