Key Ideas in Evaluation

What type of evaluation techniques are there?

If you are using a course management system such as WebCT, you have the following options:

  • Track student features - Access logs can tell you what was accessed, how frequently, in what order, etc.
  • Survey tools - Create surveys about various aspects of your course.
  • Anonymous discussion areas - Students provide ongoing feedback or answer specific survey questions.
  • Evaluation rubrics - Evaluate your own course for improvement.

What should you evaluate?

Evaluation Point 1: Course Evaluation

Before the course even begins, you should evaluate your course. Does it include all the information you intend to cover? Are all the links functioning? Are the directions clear? Do your assignments match your course learning objectives? Have you provided enough support for new learners? The list of things you can evaluate about your course is extensive. Fortunately, there are several good evaluation tools to help you. Additionally, you can create your own checklist to ensure that you've met your own criteria.

Evaluation Point 2: Student Access

You check into the course and note that several of your students have not completed the first assignment. What is going on? Do they not understand the assignment? Are they 'bad' students? Have they found the first assignment? Before the learning can even begin, students need to be able to access the course - not just get into WebCT, for example, but also understand your course structure and organization. If they aren't accessing the course, then they can't do the assignment. So, you need to evaluate the situation and determine what is going on so you can fix it. The track students feature of WebCT can really help with this.

Questions to ask yourself

  • Who has accessed the course and who hasn't?
  • What pages have they accessed?
  • Does the access rate seem high - in other words, does it look like students have been bouncing back and forth between pages, perhaps because they're confused?

When to ask

It's critical that you keep a close eye on the track students pages during the first few weeks so that you can take action as needed and before a student gets too far behind. If you note that a student hasn't accessed the course, call or email the student to find out if the student has an access problem. If you note that a student has been accessing the pages multiple times in the first week, call or email the student and find out if there is some confusion about what to do.

Evaluation Point 3 : Student Perceptions

Your students' perception of course, unit, assignment is a good first evaluation step. If they are finding the course too difficult, too boring, etc. then they will tune out. If they're not engaged with the course, not motivated to participate, or just not enjoying the course, they will drop the course or not apply themselves. That will lead to lower student achievement. So, you need to find out if students are perceiving the course well.

Questions to ask your students

  • Did the course meet your expectations?
  • What were your expectations for this course and why?
  • Was the pacing of the course too fast, too slow or just right?
  • Was the course too easy, too hard or just about right?
  • Do you feel you were prepared to take this course and why or why not?

When to ask

Different types of questions need to be asked at different times. For example, if you are evaluating student perceptions of the course, you might want to ask at the midway point or at the end of the course (depending upon whether you intend to make changes to the course in progress or use the date to improve the next section). However, if you are asking student perceptions of specific assignments, you would want to ask right after they complete the assignment.

How to ask

You could collect data on these points in several ways. If you are using WebCT, for example, you could ask the questions in an anonymous discussion area. Or, you could create a survey and have students respond to that. The survey will be quicker / easier; the discussions might yield more useful, in-depth data.

 

Evaluation Point 4 : Student Learning

You give a quiz and, while grading it, note that most of the students have missed the same question or questions. What's going on? Did they not understand the concept? Is the question worded poorly? Was the information covered in the course? Or perhaps you asked students to do a project and key components of the project were missing from most of their work. Were you unclear about expectations? Did they understand the concepts behind the key components? Or, did they simply not learn that info? In this type of evaluation, you are attempting to determine what is going on with student learning.

Steps to take

  • Ask the students what they thought the question meant. You can do this is a discussion forum or even using the survey tool.
  • Rewrite the quiz question and give a one-question quiz to see if students do better with the new question. Use the quiz tool for this.
  • Look over your schedule to see if you covered the concept in your course. If you did cover it, did you cover it in an understandable way? For example, did you assume some base knowledge (say, from a pre-requisite course) that wasn't there? Determining the problem and solution in this instance will require a bit more sleuthing.