From lynam@copland.udel.edu Wed Jul 18 11:29:22 2001 Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 13:32:10 -0400 (EDT) From: Joy S Lynam To: course-evals@copland.udel.edu Subject: Notes from 07-03-01 course eval meeting To course evalutaion team members, Here are some notes from our meeting on Tuesday. If you have comments, please feel free to let me know. Faculty having an ID & PIN will have access to this application. There is no public access. The faculty members' roles (dean, chair, instructor) determine what they could view or update. Enrolled students with ID & PIN would have access during a confined period to submit evaluations for courses participating in this application. Are there an optimum number of questions? One comment made was that the balance between the multiple choice and essay questions was important. On one of the sites that Dick provided last week, an institution used up to 50 questions! That seems like a lot. Anyway, the question still remains .. should we limit the total number of questions? Is there a commonly used scale? It was mentioned that a 5-point scale with 5 being high/good may be most familiar. We will discuss this on July 19th when we talk about the building a question page options. Last December we had 30-minute time-outs on the evaluation screens for security reasons. For this application, we need to consider what that means and if we should forego it. We can just note this for now and worry about it later. Should we provide multiple assessments during the term with differing questions? For fall, we will probably not be able to do this since we will be coding during the term with a goal to make this application available at the end of the term. This has been added to a future wish list at http://www.udel.edu/lynam/course-evals/future.html. Team teaching - the recommendation was that each instructor should be able to provide questions to the one evaluation the student sees for a course section. We need to evaluate the data to see how to do this. We also need to evaluate the viewing of results for team taught courses. We will consider this later. Penn State uses 4 questions across all courses. They have a 70 questions in a "bank" from which faculty may choose. U. of Washington has questions by course format (lecture, lab, ) One of the goals of this team is to use this course evaluation system for instructor assessment and for course assessment. This would be accomplished by the questions used by faculty members. Should we have a question catalog from which faculty may choose questions to add to their assessments? This idea has been added to a "Futures" list available from our team web page. The team decided that any faculty may see any questions asked (not student responses) in any college by any faculty member. The goal is collaboration. Faculty members who instruct the course sections, their chairs and their deans may view student responses for that section assessment. Only those with a need to know will have access to student responses. Should this application be driven by final exam dates? See the flow at http://www.udel.edu/lynam/course-evals/flowchart.html Next meeting is Thursday, July 19 at 10:30 in room 254, 192 S. Chapel Street. We really need everyone there. Please let me know ahead of time if you can not make it. Thanks, Joy