I was thinking about what Larry said at our last meeting re: the low rate of student evaluations. this is definitely a hard problem, with no easy solution that I know of. and it is true that student evaluations have an official institutional role here (not entirely clear what that role is, but it is definitely official) - and it's also true that you can get some really good feedback from student evaluations.

at the same time, I wanted to put in a plug for self-evaluation of online courses. this is something I've circulated before but I'll circulate it again because I think it is INCREDIBLY helpful - it's a set of course design evaluation guidelines by an online course group at MacEwan College in Canada. completing this evaluation helped me to make some good changes to my course, and also made me feel a lot more secure about the approaches I was taking! here's a link to their Evaluation Criteria:

http://www.imd.macewan.ca/imd/content.php?contentid=36

and they also have it available as a Word document for easier printing, or if you want to answer the questions by editing a document directly in Word:

http://www.imd.macewan.ca/imd/documents/onlineEvaluating.doc

I'm not sure what we can do to get better student response rates on the official instructor evaluation - but I would definitely urge people to spend some time on a self-evaluation like this on the design of the course (which you can do BEFORE the semester begins, preventing possible problems before they start). I know that time is always at a premium, but from my own experience I would say doing this kind of self-evaluation is a very good use of instructor time!

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Posted by Laura Gibbs to OU...Online at 6/7/2004 11:16:20 AM