Dal course evaluations go online

Dal’s Student Ratings of Instruction (SRI) are entering the digital age this year.

This semester, for the first time, course evaluations in nearly all Dalhousie faculties will be completed online. Students will be able to access the secure website during instructor-designated class time on any Internet-enabled electronic devices they bring with them (laptops, smartphones, etc.), or they can complete the evaluations on their own time, between November 19 and midnight on December 4, the last day of classes.

Learn more: SRI website (Centre for Learning and Teaching)

Deborah Kiceniuk, associate director (institutional initiatives) with the Centre for Learning and Teaching, says the new system is designed to improve the administration of the universal course evaluation form, a critical tool for assessing teaching and learning effectiveness across the university.

“From an environmental and a cost-saving perspective, and in terms of data collection and user experience, this is certainly a more efficient system,” she says.

In the old system, the CLT team would have to send out nearly 60,000 paper forms across Dal, then collect, scan and share the results back with departments — a process that often took well into the subsequent term, and contained a lot more possibility for human error. Now, students’ confidential feedback is collated instantly, and faculty will be able to independently access their courses’ evaluations and comments soon after the grades have been submitted.

New way of facilitating a familiar process

The online SRI form will be used for the vast majority of Dal courses this term. (The exceptions: the Faculty of Medicine and the College of Pharmacy, which use their own course evaluation system; the Faculty of Agriculture, which will be integrated in the near future; and courses with more than one instructor and have TAs, for which students will receive a separate online survey using the OPINIO software.)

The SRI process kicks off next week as teaching faculty and department administrators will be invited to access the system to add their custom questions. These allow both individual instructors and departments to ask students for specific feedback. The custom questions are in addition to the eight universal questions on every SRI form, which students rate on a scale from one (the lowest) to five (the highest).  The eight areas included in the universal questions are:

•    Stimulation of learning
•    Organization
•    Communication
•    Enthusiasm
•    Fairness
•    Feedback
•    Concern for students
•    Overall teaching effectiveness

From there, it’s over to the students: on November 19, students will receive an email invitation to a secure website, hosted on Dal’s servers, where they can fill out their evaluations and add additional comments. They have until midnight on December 4 to complete the online form for each class, and they don’t have to complete all of them at once: each time students log into the website, they will see which evaluations still need to be completed. (Though they can’t change an evaluation form once it’s been officially “submitted.”)

As well, faculty will be asked to allow some class time during the course evaluation period for students to complete the SRI forms on their laptops or smartphones, similar to what they would have done with the paper forms. The difference this year is that if students aren’t in class — or if they don’t have an Internet-ready device that day —they can complete the evaluations at any time until the end of classes.

This process also means that faculty who elect to make the results of the eight common questions available to students, in accordance with Senate’s SRI policy, can do so with the touch of a button once they review the results. Students can then search these results under the learning resources tab in MyDal.

Students: Have your say

The new online system was trialed this summer in several courses in the Faculty of Computer Science.

“It wasn’t all that different,” says Derek Reilly, assistant professor in Computer Science, who used the online evaluation with his undergrad students in a combined honours/graduate course.

“I got to add my own questions, which was important as you don’t always get answers specific to your own course from the standard questions. And though my class was small, and everyone was in attendance that day, I could see it being useful in a big class where you may only have two-thirds of the students there on the day where you ask them to fill it out.”

And that’s a crucial point: while the new system comes with its benefits, it does place more responsibility on students to complete the forms.  

Dr. Kiceniuk says it’s worth their while.

“I think students can sometimes underestimate how valuable these evaluations are, and how their feedback can have a direct impact on teaching effectiveness and career decisions at Dalhousie,” she says.  

She reminds students that the system is anonymous and that no identifying information is provided to instructors or administrators.

“Instructors will read all of these: they’ll get the results, they’ll read all the comments, and they’ll be able to incorporate the suggestions into their teaching practices right away.”

She adds that the evaluations are also used in processes for tenure and promotion, and other human resource decisions.  

“This is not the only way we evaluate teaching at Dalhousie, but it’s the point of the process where the students’ voice is the most present,” says Dr. Kiceniuk. “So it’s important that they have their say.”

Faculty and students who have questions about the new SRI system, or simply want to learn more about it, can find contacts and more information at the Centre for Learning and Teaching website.