EXPLORING THE UTILITY OF USING A VLE FOR WEEKLY STUDENT EVALUATIONS OF TEACHING

Tiffany Winchester and Maxwell Winchester
Harper Adams University College
UK

This exploratory study investigated faculty use of formative, weekly, online student evaluations of teaching. Results were based on interviews of six faculty members at a rural university college in the United Kingdom. While faculty were initially keen to use the feedback received from the students, reviewing the feedback each week soon became too onerous a task and tended to be superficially reviewed once very few weeks. Another issue was the lack of overall student participation in completing the evaluation forms, which gave rise to questions of how representative the answers were. Those faculty members who were more involved in this student evaluation used the feedback to improve their teaching and as an incentive to improve future classes. Variations were found in faculty use of evaluation feedback, as a result of difference in background and experience.

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