Student evaluations of instructor, course, and course materials provide guidance for the institutions on areas of relative strengths and areas where there may be room for improvement. Bearing in mind that old data is not usefully actionable data, the intent of this report is to convey broad themes in the evaluations to decision makers as rapidly as possible.
This report presumes familiarity with the student evaluations form in use at the institution. This report is based on 976 student evaluations. The overall average response on a five point scale was 4.35 with a standard deviation of 0.98. As noted in the past, students tend to respond with agree or strongly agree. Teasing information out of means that are similar requires the realization that an excess of agrees relative to other ratings in the section represent a downgrade for that item. The following report looks to highlight what are small but potentially real differences.
Instructor evaluations
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As was seen last fall, the first question on overall instructor effectiveness was rated lower than most of the rest of the metrics.
Timely feedback has been a challenge for the institution in past evaluations as well. This author is reminded that in this modern age of digitally supported education there are no days off, no distinction between working hours and non-working hours. Teachers never could clock out at 3:00, or 5:00, now they can never clock out. Students expect same day responses. That said, if an instructor cannot provide timely feedback then at the minimum an instructor can respond with words to the effect that they have received the message or assignment.
While training might be considered to improve timely feedback, the most important tool a faculty member can have for timely feedback is a cell phone with the Canvas Teacher app and notifications enabled.
As an area of strength, instructors are well conveying awareness of the student learning outcomes.
Course evaluations
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While students are clearly aware of the learning outcomes for a course, the students rate as lower the focus those outcomes provided to their course. Test and evaluation procedures were also not perceived as being fair. Again, the mean is above four, so this is a relative deficit but not an indication that testing at the college is unfair. Note that the assignments being deemed appropriate had a t-score of zero which means that the value was at the average for this section.
Instructional materials evaluation
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Students downgraded the appropriateness of their textbooks and ease of access to their textbooks. Canvas received the strongest positive rating in this section. Canvas in generally well liked by the students.
Where practical and possible, perhaps textbooks should be available online. This author has been able to integrate textbooks for his courses into Canvas Pages for native display capabilities in the Canvas Student app and on laptops/desktops. For many courses, however, that will not be an option.
When asked, "For learning materials in the course, which one of the following do you prefer?" the students overwhelmingly preferred in-class lecture followed by the textbook, online presentations, online videos, and online videoconferencing (the word videoconferencing was truncated out of the label above). Synchronous videoconferencing remains a least liked method of learning materials.
Unpacking the meaning in the materials preferences requires knowing that the student respondents are in residential, online, and hybrid courses as seen above. Thus the preference for in-class lecture exceeds the number of students in residential courses by almost two to one. This supports the argument that there are students in online courses who would prefer to be in residential courses.
When asked what their preferred mode of delivery for the course that they are in, the students responded strongly with residential/face-to-face instruction. Demand for online courses is seen in only about one third of the students. Students who prefer online courses prefer asynchronous online courses. Perhaps these are students with schedules that preclude residential and synchronous education. The strength of online education is in asynchronously delivered materials.
Generally speaking, students prefer residential instruction supported by a textbook but find that their textbooks are not appropriate to the course content and are, in some instances, having issues with accessing the textbook for their course.
Average by prefix
A look at the mean course rating by course prefixes for course prefixes with five or more evaluations submitted is presented in descending order above. Averages above a 4.5 would require a preponderance of fives in the course evaluation section. Averages below four would require a number of evaluations below "agree." Note the CE refers primarily to a course "CE 104" and is effectively a course rating, and not a subject area rating. LA are LAW courses, not liberal arts.
Interactions
136 students in online courses would have preferred to be in a residential course. Of students in residential courses 14 wanted to be in an asynchronous online course and only 9 wanted to be in a synchronous online course. Students in a mixed online and residential course (hybrid) predominantly wanted to be in a residential experience.
When asked, "For learning materials in the course, which one of the following do you prefer?," the students dominantly preferred in class lectures - including students in hybrid and online courses.
While students in online courses express a preference for in class lectures, after that preference the online students prefer textbooks, presentations, videos, and then videoconferencing in that order. Synchronous video conferencing such as Zoom is not favored by the students.
Physical campus with which the student respondents are associated
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