Hello everyone. A few weeks ago I talked about the online class and teacher evaluation system the Senate is building and scheduled to complete before fall registration. We have made significant progress in determining our requirements—what the system will do—and technical design specifications. This system will provide students with a way to evaluate professor performance and teaching styles as well as class structure and effectiveness.
There are two pieces of information that we provide. First, we will be publishing some of results from IDEA surveys that students fill out at the end of each class. The surveys give information about professor performance, class structure, amount of work involved, and amount learned. We are still negotiating what information will be made public, although we have already determined that most of it will.
The second piece is a discussion board that we will create for each class giving students an opportunity to add additional information about the professor or class. We may also put additional survey questions here. While this information will be completely subjective—and it will be made known that the information is subjective and may not be accurate—we will be asking the teaching staff to support the system by asking their students to add additional comments using our site. We think this will encourage both students who did and did not enjoy the class to participate instead of having students that had difficulty with the class overwhelm with comments. We will be taking steps to garner support from the teaching staff within the next few weeks.
The system will also have a few other components. We will be creating a teacher “honor role” for each school that will be published on the front page. The list would be for teachers that have passed a certain performance threshold that is to be determined. In addition the front page will contain a way for students to nominate teachers for the RAA Outstanding Teacher Award given each year. The award includes $5,000 that is to be used at the teacher’s discretion for class room teaching aids and equipment.
We’ll be adding features that make it easy for students to get to specific classes quickly and also look at a professor who may teach multiple classes. In addition, there will be a search engine allowing students to search for a specific class or professor.
As we move into the prototype phase we need help, especially in the area of usability. We need to know if the system we create is easy to use and contains enough useful features. We can only do this with a few students trying it out and making user interface suggestions. Please contact me at gm@rpi.edu if you are interested in spending a very small amount of time doing this. We would really value your feedback.
As I’m writing this article my phone is ringing with people asking for a snow day. I have no control over this! But it would be nice to have a four day weekend! Good night everyone and enjoy the rest of your short week.
