Tidbits, Resources, and Discussion for ELI Faculty

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Please Vote!

I've been pleased to hear from many of you lately that you are reading and enjoying the blog. Many more of you are reading than are commenting--which is pretty standard for blogs. Lots of lurkers, and a few steady commenters. I hope that more of you will join in the conversation over time--at least on the issues and questions that interest you most strongly. You can always post your comment anonymously if you're not comfortable putting your name with your comment at this point.

For now, commenters and lurkers alike--please vote in the poll on the left side of the screen to help me start thinking about how we're doing with the student course evaluations. If you want to share comments about why you voted the way you did, what other options I should have included but didn't, or anything else about the evaluations, you can post them to this blog entry.

And, note that you can select more than one of the options in the poll, if appropriate.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I want to explain WHY I do not use the evaluations students give my course.
1. I find that not many students bother to give evaluations and most of those who do, do so because they have a negative response/critique to voice. So the findings give a skewed perspective on the value of the course
2. the way the evaluations are collected is not very helpful. It seems to be a running (appended) file with no distinction in terms of which semester the feedback is related to. When I have looked at these in the past. I could not tell what was new/added since the last time I looked and often waste more time than it is worth to look at and review material, most of which I've seen before is old and outdated (as I've changed the course since many of these older comments were made).
To make these evaluations more valuable to me/faculty, find a more effective way to get more students to fill out these surveys (e.g., send a link to all students through e-mail as they get to the last week of enrollment). And have the record reflect the dates that open-ended feedback is provided. It is this open-ended feedback that most interests me that much of my above comments relate to.

Jennifer Lerner said...

I do use my student evaluations for ELI courses, but Laura, I fully agree with you that it is annoying to read the qualitative comments (which I, too, find more valuable than the close-ended questions) but not be able to see the dates for each one.