Student evaluations spring 2025
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. Although the evaluation was only distributed to students in online courses, some of those students were also in residential courses. With the evaluation used in all courses fall 2024 there were 1360 responses. Spring 2025 has received 482 responses as of 13 May 2025.
Edits: Where noted below, some charts and text were subsequently updated. The last day of regular classes was Monday 12 May 2025.
Edit 16 May 2025: Spring 2025 had a cumulative submission rate that differed significantly from spring 2024
Updated 5/19/2025
Based on past experience this report was originally prepared on the first day of final examinations for the online courses. Past experience has been that only a few evaluations come in after the last day and those evaluations do not affect the results. This term has been very different. Almost half of the evaluations arrived during the final examination period.
The spring 2025 evaluations were prepared in early April and shared to the instructional coordinators by 08 April 2025. The early release was intended to allow instructors to deploy creative solutions to increasing the submission rate.
The instructor for the online section MS 150/O1 made the student evaluation an assignment worth the same number of points as an average homework assignment.
Student in the online section were to submit a screenshot of the header, and the header only, of the student evaluation. This protected the instructor from seeing the responses while providing some evidence that the student completed the course evaluation.
The assignment included the image seen above. The course evaluation image changes every term, thus the assignment ensures that the student at least viewed the evaluation. Without giving away the identity of the respondent, the instructor has no way to ensure the student then submitted the evaluation.
Spring 2024 MS 150/O1 received a single course evaluation submission out of 20 online students. Spring 2025 had 13 evaluation submissions out of 25 online students (52%). By term end, however, only 14 students were still actively submitting work in the course, the 13 submission were from the 14 students who were still actively engaged in the course (93%).
The spring 2025 results echoed the findings of last fall with some of the same areas of relative strength and weakness.
Ninety-two percent of the responses were strongly agree (5) or agree (4). For a student to choose a four is less common than a five and a choice below a four is a unusual. This suggests that even a four is, in some sense, a negative rating, especially wherein students are marking a mix of responses.
The course syllabi were deemed to be clear and complete, this was the only area of relative strength.
The one area of relative strength was the relevance of the course materials.
Sample size n = 533
Spring 2025 areas of relative strength and relative weakness
Areas of relative strength include the syllabus, awareness of SLOs, instructor's command of their subject area, relevance of material, and clarity of the content.
Areas of relative weakness included regularity and promptness of instructor contact, ability to access the course textbook, instructors presenting material in an objective manner, and the learning management system. The specific prompt for presenting material in an objective manner was, "The instructor presented data and information fairly and objectively, distinguishing between personal beliefs and professionally accepted views."
Fall 2024 areas of relative strength and relative weakness
Combining the data in the first two charts highlights the overlap in areas of relative strength and weakness term-on-term. Ability to access the textbook remains an area that has been stubbornly recalcitrant to remediation at least back to fall 2022.
This report presumes familiarity with the student evaluations form in use at the institution. The responses were converted to numeric values:
- Strongly disagree
- Disagree
- Neutral
- Agree
- Strongly agree
Students dominantly mark strongly agree or agree which were assigned scores of five and four respectively. In the following, the numeric score equivalents are usually referenced rather than the rating word. Every prompt is a positively worded prompt where higher values are better.
One half of the respondents mark a "straight ticket" going straight down a single column. This behavior suggests the students are not reading and responding to each individual prompt.
The most common "straight" was for students who marked all fives - 79.4% of the students marked straight down the first column.
In the past this first column was "strongly disagree." But a check of comments showed that students were not reading the ratings - the students were strongly disagreeing with the prompt and then wrote glowing, positive comments about their wonderful teacher and excellent course. The large number of spurious "strongly disagree" values was eliminated summer 2024 by making the first rating "strongly agree." This led to an increase in the mean rating by term starting with summer 2024.
Updated chart 16 May at n = 755
As of 14 May the overall average was 4.491. With the 210 additional responses between 14 May and 16 May the average fell to 4.478. This suggests that students who intended to respond slightly more negatively may have been waiting until the final examinations were over to respond to the student evaluations.
Updated 16 May 2025 at n=756 (evaluations continue to be submitted)
Student responses term-on-term are down as a result of the evaluation form only being distributed to online classes. The form, however, could be filled out by students in face-to-face residential courses.
Instructor evaluations
Updated 14 May 2025 at n=542. Click to enlarge
The overall average for the prompts in the instructor evaluation section was 4.502, just slightly above the overall average of 4.491. The first prompt has traditionally underperformed all of the other prompts in this section. This term that long standing pattern was broken and "The instructor initiated regular contact with the student through discussions, review sessions, feedback on assignments, and/or emails" was the lowest rating in this section.
Updated 14 May 2025 at n=542. Click to enlarge
By calculating a t-statistic, the small differences can still be used as a first approximation to areas of relative strength and relative weakness. Prompts with a t-statistic between -2 and 2 can be considered to be functionally equivalent to the mean.
Areas of relative strength were:
- The instructor presented the course content clearly
- The instructor made sure that the students were aware of the Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) for the course
- Clear directions were being given
- The instructor demonstrated thorough knowledge of the subject
Areas of relative weakness were:
- The instructor initiated regular contact with the student through discussions, review sessions, feedback on assignments, and/or emails
- The instructor presented data and information fairly and objectively, distinguishing between personal beliefs and professionally accepted views
- I received feedback on assignments/quizzes/exams in time to prepare for the next assignment/quiz/exam
Edit: Updated chart 16 May at n = 755. Colors were not updated. Note that overall effectiveness now matches prior terms: significantly negative. Regular contact remains problematic.
A deep dive into the issue of regular contact was reported in the fall 2024 evaluation report. Recommendations made fall 2024 included clearly communicating response time expectations, promptly addressing student inquiries within a reasonable timeframe (usually within 24 - 48 hours), providing timely feedback on assignments (usually prior to the next assignment's due date), maintaining consistent communication through announcements and updates, offering virtual office hours, and being accessible through multiple channels like email and discussion boards, while also clearly indicating potential delays during holidays or weekends.
Faculty teaching online courses should have cell phones with the Moodle app to improve response times.
Trends over time (click to enlarge). Not updated from original report.
In terms of trend over time, the issue of regular contact is not trending upward at the same rate as other metrics in this section. Due to regression to the long term mean these values cannot be expected to improve indefinitely. And the current positive values are in large part due to the previously covered issue of students marking the first column when they meant to mark strongly agree. This was resolved in summer 2024 by reversing the rating order, but this also means that all scores have trended upwards. With those caveats, instructors should continue to improve regularity of contact with their students.
Course evaluations
Updated 14 May 2025 at n=542. Click to enlarge
The average for the evaluations of the course was 4.513, the highest of the evaluation section averages.
Updated 14 May 2025 at n=542. Click to enlarge
The one area of relative weakness was for the prompt: There was enough time to finish assignments.
Updated chart 16 May at n = 755. Colors were not updated. No significant change from n = 542.
Clarity of syllabi showed the strongest upward trend. The emphasis placed on ensuring courses have syllabi has generated positive results. Accessibility of the syllabus is enhanced by use of the Page resource in Moodle as opposed to uploading a file in a word processing or PDF (Portable Document Format). Moodle Pages reflow to display natively in the Moodle app on cell phones. Instructors who are still uploading Microsoft Word documents or PDF files should be encouraged to move their material into a Moodle native format such as the Page resource.
Syllabus as a Moodle Page
Course materials evaluations
Updated 14 May 2025 at n=542. Click to enlarge
The section mean for the course materials evaluations was the lowest of the three evaluation sections at 4.455. The strongest negative impact was for ease of access to the textbook.
Updated 14 May 2025 at n=542. Click to enlarge
The one area of relative strength was the relevance of the course materials.
Although the course materials were deemed relevant, these materials which were deemed to be relevant apparently did not include the textbook as the textbook was difficult to access.
In the first edition of this report with a sample size of 482 respondents Moodle was not significantly below the mean. With an additional 60 responses in the 24 hours after the first edition, the t-score for Moodle dropped to significantly below the mean.
Updated chart 16 May at n = 755. Colors were not updated. Online resources crossed the +2.00 line of positive significance.
The 60 responses between 13 and 14 May were 58% state campus responses. Exploring the theory that perhaps the respondents at state campuses were finding Moodle more challenging led to calculating the mean on this prompt for each campus.
Sample size n = 533
The means for this prompts do not support a theory that respondents physically located on campuses other than the national campus were finding Moodle less satisfactory than the national campus.
Moodle Book resource on a mobile device
The Book resource in Moodle rescales images and reflows text to fit the displaying device. The Moodle app also has the capability to download native Moodle content and provide access when offline. Swiping left and right moves to a new chapter, up and down scrolls the current chapter. There is also an automatically generated table of contents for the book. 
Ease of access to the textbook has been an area of weakness since at least fall 2022, and, anecdotally, this challenge goes back even further. Textbook access is an area where the adoption of open educational resources could have a tremendous impact.
Moodle Book resource on a desktop
Perhaps the optimum solution would be for the textbook to be integrated as a Book resource in Moodle, but this is only possible for courses where the instructor has authored the textbook.
Moodle Book resource on a mobile device
Other metrics
Student evaluation responses have come in from students on all five campuses.
While 68% of the responses are from students in online classes, 32% are from students who report being in hybrid or residential courses.
Although the respondents are dominantly in online courses, almost half of the respondents prefer to be a residential course. As suggested in the report last fall, there are indications that the ratio of online to residential courses is too high with respect to what the students say they want. The complication is that the students say they want residential courses but the online courses fill up faster than the residential courses. Despite this, the strength of this institution is its physical presence on four of the islands in the FSM. These physical campuses represent both a strength and an opportunity. In the online world the institution is another cyber college competing with other institutions in cyberspace.
Students preference in terms of online materials reinforces the data that suggests the strength of the institution is in the residential offerings: students report to prefer in-class lectures by a large margin over any other learning delivery materials. Online asynchronous presentations in a statistical tie with online videos. As a preference, textbooks are in fourth place. In fifth and last place are online synchronous video conferences. Students take online classes so that their education can fit around their work or home schedule. Online synchronous video (Zoom/Meet) classes are problematic for those who have day time jobs.
Comments on the instructor as summarized by Gemini
Instructor feedback ranges from highly positive, praising instructors for clear teaching, knowledge, support, and effectiveness, to suggestions for improvements. Common positive feedback includes praise for being prepared, helpful, and engaging, with many stating "everything is good" or "no changes needed." Suggestions for improvement include clearer instructions, more timely and detailed feedback on assignments, more real-world examples, increased student interaction (especially in online settings), using Moodle more effectively for posting assignments, more engaging activities like quizzes or games, and in some cases, needing more time or face-to-face meetings. A few negative feedbacks express dissatisfaction with lack of engagement or communication. Overall, a majority of feedback is positive, but there are clear areas for improvement noted by some students.
Comments on the course as summarized by Gemini
Student feedback on the course varied. Many students found the course good, helpful, and well-structured, and appreciated the instructor. Some preferred online delivery, citing clarity and ease of understanding, while a significant number requested a switch to face-to-face instruction for better interaction. Specific suggestions included clearer assignment guidelines, more detailed feedback, enhanced video explanations, more practical assignments, group activities, extra time for questions, and a need for instructors to check up on student needs regularly. There were also requests for demonstrations in an actual classroom setting, more examples, study guides, review sessions before exams, Zoom meetings, and adjustments to deadlines for working students. Some students suggested changing or choosing professors. Other students were completely satisfied with the course as it was, expressing that no changes were needed.
Comments on course materials as summarized by Gemini
Course material feedback is largely positive, with many students finding materials accessible and helpful. Some suggest clearer language, additional resources like videos and local examples, highlighting key points, and clearer assignment instructions. Concerns about instructor teaching style also surfaced in several comments. A few students requested more hands-on materials and better integration of online and face-to-face elements.
General comments as summarized by Gemini
Student feedback on courses is largely positive, with many expressing gratitude to instructors, finding courses helpful and informative, and appreciating distance learning opportunities. Some students desire more interaction with instructors, clearer feedback, more timely grading, and better internet connectivity. There are also specific requests for laptop access, more assignments in some cases, less group work in others, and varied experiences with instructor responsiveness and teaching styles. Many appreciate the flexibility of online learning, while some prefer traditional classrooms. Several students highlight particular instructors for their kindness, support, and effective teaching, while a few voice dissatisfaction with certain aspects of specific courses or instructors. Overall, the feedback reflects diverse experiences and suggestions for improvement in teaching methods, course materials, and support services.
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