5 Steps to Maximize the Value of Course Evaluations for Continuous Improvement

Course evaluations have a great impact on course improvement, teaching effectiveness, student experience and institutional effectiveness. Due to the significance of these assessments, universities need to find more effective ways to use course evaluations and to increase student participation and engagement.

Today’s post will outline a five-step innovative process to improve the course evaluation process and to help create a culture of continuous improvement at your institution.

1. Commit to move online:

   Committing to moving assessments online is the first step in the process of continuous improvement. As we have closely examined in previous posts, course evaluations have a number of strategic and operational benefits. Some benefits include saving time and money, gathering better quality data, no data entry errors and quicker access to results. However, committing to moving your evaluations online doesn’t have to happen all at once. Be sure to read our recent post ‘Three Paths for Migrating Course Evaluations Online’ to discover three different approaches you can utilize.

2. Encourage mid-term evaluations:

   Instructors should be encouraged to implement mid-term evaluations to gain interim student feedback. Mid-term assessments help instructors gather quality feedback to improve their course and teaching approach before the more formal end-of-term evaluation. The interim feedback also allows instructors to gauge expectations, be proactive, create an open dialogue with students and improve their end-of-term evaluation results. Need more information on mid-term evaluations? Be sure to read our recent post ‘7 Elements for Effective Mid-term Course Evaluations’.

3. Create developmental goals:

   Using course evaluations to define instructor development goals is an effective way to improve the quality of teaching at your institution. This approach measures each instructor against their personal potential and rewards them for achievements. To implement this process, the university must:

   • Analyze the feedback to identify top issues for each instructor
   • Work with each instructor to create a personalized training & development plan
   • Track instructor progress from ongoing course evaluations
   • Reward instructors for any improvements.
4. Work on challenges:

   Course evaluations may reveal a myriad of challenges that your institution has to address campus-wide. The evaluation results can be used to identify issues and to create a list of top actionable items. Administration needs to recognize the challenges that can be realistically addressed, take action and commit resources to finding solutions. These issues may include any elements that affect the student’s ability to concentrate in the classroom such as physical facilities, campus safety, cafeteria food, tuition fees, policies, etc.

5. Develop a transparent registration process:

   The last step in the process is to develop a transparent registration process. Course surveys play a big part in creating this transparency by making past evaluation data available to students. With the appropriate systems in place, students could access the results through the student portal or learning management system. In this transparent process, students would be able to filter the results by course, teacher and year. This is a great benefit to students who can use the past evaluation data to determine which courses they should register for. This also increases student engagement in the evaluation process as students see first-hand how their feedback benefits students, instructors and the institution.