Are you interested in improving your teaching techniques? Would you appreciate feedback from current students that could potentially help you to increase student satisfaction? The new campus-wide online course evaluation system may provide you with a resource for just such information.

This fall, Institutional Research, Planning and Assessment (IRPA) and OIT will pilot the new system across all regular courses on campus—more than 16,000 of them. Students will receive e-mail notifying them of the dates of the course evaluation period, which begins after Thanksgiving, and instructing them on how to complete the online evaluations. This fall’s evaluations will consist of 15 university-level items rating the course and instructor. In the future, colleges, departments, and instructors will be able to add their own questions to the evaluations for students in their courses.

“We are still calling the new course evaluation system a pilot for the fall,” said Renee Baird Snyder, IRPA’s Coordinator for Course Evaluations, “because we have not yet put it to the test of operating at such a large capacity.” While there is no opt-out for colleges or departments regarding participation in this new system, groups that have used previously established systems for evaluating courses can continue to use those systems this fall while the new one is being piloted. Some colleges have used WebCT for their course evaluations previously. WebCT will continue to operate through December for the purpose of course evaluation only.

The newly developed course evaluation system was requested by students and officially called for in a decision by the University Senate in 2005. The resulting standardized set of evaluation results will provide the university with useful information on teaching and student learning across the campus. Answers to the universal set of course evaluation questions will allow both students and administrators to make more meaningful and consistent comparisons of courses and instructors at the university. The 15 university-level questions that will be asked of all students in all courses have been adapted from various items used on campus in different colleges over the years and were developed with input from the Course Evaluation Advisory Committee representing various colleges, graduate and undergraduate student government, the graduate school, and the provost’s office. The provost also sent those items to the entire faculty for review.

Instructors should be able to see results for all items in the evaluation starting in January after the grade-submission deadline. Additionally, faculty and administrators involved in the tenure and promotion process and other administrators addressing the needs of their academic department will have access to administrative results. Students will be able to see the results for the seven student-related items for courses across campus if 1) they have completed all their course evaluations for the previous term, and 2) 70 percent or more of the students enrolled in any individual course have submitted evaluations for that course. “We are counting on student participation for this process, because without it the system will fail,” said Snyder. She added: “The reality is that the successful transition to the campus-wide online system will take the support of all course instructors promoting participation among their students. We are asking the faculty to remind students to take the campus evaluation, to explain to them its importance, and to help them understand why they may be asked to complete a college-level shadow evaluation this fall and perhaps next spring.”

The process allowing evaluation items to be added at the college, department, and instructor levels will be piloted in the spring with a few colleges. IRPA anticipates that by fall 2008 all levels of the system (university, college, department, and instructor) will be available to all colleges and for all courses.

For more information about the course evaluation project, please visit https://www.irpa.umd.edu/Assessment/crs_eval.shtml.