Volume 3, No. 41 October 24, 2003
Online course evaluations available Nov. 3 By John Bennett Eileen Janson predicts online course evaluations will become part of the culture of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Janson, assessment and quality manager in the department of institutional research, said she has high hopes for the new method of soliciting student feedback, which debuts next month. “It’s a new system that will be available this quarter. We are going to start out with about 50 percent of the classes,” she said. “They were chosen by the academic services department. They decided which ones they wanted to try online and which ones they wanted to evaluate traditionally with the paper forms.” Based on a limited trial run of online course evaluations this summer, Janson said she suspects the quality of information generated by the online forms will be superior. “We found the comments to be much more thoughtful and I think that’s perhaps because the students were not rushed,” she said. “Students can sit down and think about it. They are looking at the computer screen and there’s nothing distracting them.” Evaluations will go live Nov. 3. Students will receive personal announcements on their MySCAD home pages announcing that evaluations are available. Clicking a link in the announcement will take students to a list of their classes that are available for online evaluation. “For example, if a student is enrolled in three classes and two of them are being evaluated online and one on paper, the only ones he’ll see are the two being evaluated online,” Janson said. Clicking on the classes will reveal the evaluation forms, which students should find familiar. While based on the paper form, the online version has an added feature. “One advantage with the online form is the comments field available after each statement,” she said. “Whereas with the paper form, it is just two comment areas at the end of the form. Students will have the opportunity to provide more meaningful feedback.” Students who have privacy concerns, Janson said, should feel confident that their identities will remain confidential when they use the online forms to evaluate their courses. “Once students hit the submit button, all their data goes to a table,” Janson said. “When the data is placed in the table, all identifying information that would connect students with the data is stripped away.” While students must display a certain level of self-motivation to complete the courses online, Janson said they actually will have a larger window of opportunity to express their views on classes because the forms will be available for a full two weeks. “They can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week from any Internet browser, so the student could be in the library, at home in a lab, anywhere he or she has access to the Internet,” she said. “That’s actually increasing access. With the paper forms, if a student misses class, he or she misses the opportunity evaluate the class.” Janson said professors would also appreciate not having to devote valuable class time to the distribution, completion and collection of paper forms. Once students have completed and submitted the online forms, additional advantages to the system become immediately apparent. “Evaluating courses online is a much more time- and cost-efficient process that will return results much more quickly,” Janson said. “One person currently must devote three weeks of full-time work just to prepare the paper forms. It also requires the full-time efforts of three people to process them, scan them and type all the comments.” Online forms will also reduce the chance for error inherent in the manual entry of data from online forms. And while she said she’s proud that her department has reduced the turnaround time for processing paper forms to three weeks, accurate data from the online forms will be almost instantly available. “Rather than processing thousands of individual reports and having to hand type the course title and professor’s name, in addition to typing all the comments by hand, we have reports built that generate all the comments and all the statistical information. It’s going to eliminate many, many hours of typing and decrease the possibility of error.” Janson and Vice President for Information Management and Technology Harley Lingerfelt met with United Student Forum representatives, who Janson said were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the online evaluation process. “We went to USF so that they could spread the word to their constituents that this is important and that the students need to get behind it and participate,” she said. Janson anticipates the fall quarter results will encourage the expansion of the program. “We hope it will be a big success so we can move forward, instead of returning to the paper forms which are so cumbersome,” She said. “We want a response that’s significant enough that everyone feels comfortable that they are getting some good feedback. We need to keep building on it.” And while it may take some students a while to get used to the online forms, she feels it will soon become second nature. “It’s about changing old habits,” she said. “ I parallel it to online registration. When we first went to Web registration, it was a transition for students. Now it’s a way of life. Granted, there’s not as much incentive in filling out an evaluation as there is with registering, but I think it’s something that over time will become the norm.”
Home | Accolades | What’s the Buzz | Art and About | The Reel Deal Book Marks | On the Safe Side | The Bee Line | Classifieds | Contact the Chronicle | Chronicle Archives