Teacher Defined Questions, a Headache?

Those who do vs. those who will

For many teachers, the idea of asking specific questions alongside core university questions is a novel idea. It opens the doors for them to collect some unique feedback about their teaching at a certain point in time, and it allows them a certain freedom to be as involved in the course evaluation process as they would like. Their level of freedom may extend to being able to phrase and key in their own questions to students and the results can be disseminated uniquely to them and not their supervisors.

Other teachers, however, may not see the value of personalizing their section of the questionnaire. At least not at first. With so many other activities and duties towards the end of the semester, it may take a few rounds of getting accustomed to the option and hearing from other teachers before they realize what is actually involved and how easy it is to set up. So how then to cater to both audiences with minimal disruption?

Workflow and auditing conflicts

Teachers would need a period to provide their questions ahead of students completing their evaluations. This could mean starting the process several weeks earlier to ensure that teachers have enough time to enter their questions and perhaps even to allow someone to review them before they go out to their audience. This can cause anxiety for the database administrators putting together data for the first time, not to mention the teachers and project managers given the dependencies added to the workflow. There is also no guarantee that all teachers will participate, so how can you guarantee that invitations should go out to students on time if there are delinquencies?

For some universities, the mere idea that teacher questions require an auditing committee is a challenging proposition. Not only is the number of courses prohibitive for most end of term evaluations, but in terms of team taught situations, the number of lists of teacher questions gets multiplied. This could require identifying the right person to perform the verification of each form, not to mention a need to now allow another layer to be added to the workflow, one for the supervisor. Who performs the audit? The course coordinators, department chairs, or (gasp) the deans?

Easy way out

To address the workflow situation, most universities are open to leaving the teacher added questions optional; each teacher decides for themselves whether to participate, and they are free to ignore the invitation and deadline for adding their unique questions. Their students will then still receive their invitation on schedule with the ability to fully answer the standard set of questions. In other words, if teachers have added their questions by the time students are invited, these will appear on the form, otherwise students proceed as normal and without penalty or delay.

On the audit front, the universities that have a large number of course sections to evaluate and want to apply a stricter approach to teacher questions will generally opt to forfeit the keyed in additional questions in favor of a question library, predefined by the administrator, from which teachers may easily locate and select the questions that matter most to them. This ensures a consistency in phraseology and preapproves its use in the evaluation process. Moreover, a maximum number of allowable questions can be configured to ensure overzealous teachers don’t lengthen the survey to the point student fatigue sets in.

To recap, making teacher defined questions optional is a great way to reward the early adopter who wants to add questions for their students, and through word of mouth, the number of volunteers seeing the value will rise. Teacher defined questions can be the portal to teacher becoming active participants of the responses collected.