U. of Michigan’s Online Teaching-Evaluation System Fails
Uh-oh. Not good press for Sakai (though it’s not mentioned in the article). UMich is in my annotated bibliography for online course evaluations which is why I know they’re Sakai. The comments on the article unfortunately echo the polarizing reaction to online course evaluations. Maybe I’ll post too….
The 2006 Educause sessions are now showing up as podcasts on the Educause blog site. If you dare, you can listen to my session here. I don’t know if you have the same reaction as I do to hearing a recording of yourself– but I had to stop listening after my first few sentences. It was painful. Next time I do an Educause it will be better.
Here are some links to PDFs of my Educause presentation materials. Right now the handouts are 11×17 duplexed. I’ll see about changing them to 8.5×11 form after the conference.
online course evaluations powerpoint
online course evaluations handout
The summer and start of fall term have been nonstop this year. I’m currently preparing for Educause 2006. I’m presenting a session on online course evaluations called “From Pencils to Pixels: Course Evaluations Go from Online Pilot to Production.” I’m also doing a poster session on moodle called “Moodle for the Masses: Deploying an Enterprise-Wide, Open-Source CMS.” I’m looking forward to connecting with others in Educause interested in these topics.
To Dallas!
I’ve added a new resource to my annotated bibliography on online course evaluations.
Norris, J., Conn, C. (2005). “Investigating strategies for increasing student response rates to online-delivered course evaluations.� Quarterly Review of Distance Education 2005; 6 (1) p13-32 (ProQuest document ID 975834871).
This paper reports the findings of 2 studies done at Northern Arizona State University. The first study looked at historic data from 2000-2002 to examine student responses to online course evaluations in 1108 course sections. This group had an average response rate of 31%. A follow-up questionnaire was sent to 50 faculty in the group to explore what strategies improved response rate. These results informed the second study on 39 online course sections and 21 sections of a required freshman face-to-face course. The second study used some basic strategies (no penalty strategies) in the implementation of the online course evaluations: 2 weeks before the end of the course the URL to evaluation was posted in the course management system, an announcement containing a statement of course evaluation value and due date was sent in a method appropriate to the class (email, online syllabus or discussion board), and a reminder email was sent 1 week before the class ended containing the URL and due date. The 39 online course sections averaged a 74% response rate and the 21 face-to-face courses averaged a 67% response rate. In addition, 11 sections of the face-to-face course used paper evaluations and received a 83% response rate. These suggestions are very similar to the emerging findings from the TLT Group’s BeTA project.