SEEQ and You

TEACHING & LEARNING: SEEKING USEFUL FEEDBACK FROM STUDENTS

SEEQ and You
by Toni Roberts

Why bother? Acquiring feedback on your teaching can help you . . .

SEEQ and You
Anthony Roberts, PCTC

Using technology for evaluations, assessments and surveys is not a novel idea. However, a more recent incarnation involves using an online form. This represents a relatively new way to administer and distribute evaluations, assessments and surveys, but one that has quickly caught on and has been done literally millions of times.

Students are becoming quite accustomed to online evaluations; with an estimated 3.1 million student online in 2005, the number of evaluations, assessments and surveys they have completed would be in the multi-millions as well. Tests and exams are given online and can be graded automatically with Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS) such as WebCT. Questions may be long answer, short answer, multiple choice, true/false or matching. They can incorporate equations and symbols.

Assignments can be submitted electronically through drop boxes, while comments from the instructor can be added for students to view at their leisure. Associated grades can be viewed easily online for students as well. Student surveys can be distributed online providing instructors with feedback on any number of topics that do not require grading—the current First-Year Experience survey is an example of this.

Instructors, too, may implement surveys with regards to their teaching using an online approach. Acquiring timely, informative feedback can be very important in improving teaching effectiveness.Although research seems to indicate that the number of respondents may be lower with online evaluations than face-to-face, many agree that it is perhaps better to get fewer carefully considered responses than a larger number of quickly completed surveys done in the last 5 or 10 minutes of the last day of class.

Online teaching evaluations allow time for students to consider the questions, plan thoughtful responses, and take as much time as needed to fully complete the evaluation. Students also have the flexibility to complete the evaluation at their leisure. Online evaluations allow the faculty member to customize their questions more easily, along with providing immediate statistics.

Whether online or paper-based, however, using tested and proven evaluation questions ensures trustworthy results. SEEQ, the Student Evaluation of Educational Quality, has been used for over 30 years in thousands of classes. Transforming SEEQ into an online form can be done rather simply with the help of an LCMS, such as WebCT.

WebCT is a good platform for administering this questionnaire. SEEQ contains both multiplechoice and open-ended questions, and WebCT provides both detailed statistics for multiplechoice questions and all the responses to the open-ended questions in an easy- to-read format. Faculty members can view the students’ responses online or download them for viewing later.

For the students, completing the form is straightforward. The students click the icon for the evaluation and are off and running.The questions can be delivered in a number of ways, but the most common delivery is for all questions at once. The students simply read each question in order, save their answer and continue with the next question. When they have answered each question and saved their response, they click the ‘submit’ box. Conveniently, students may also complete a portion of the form and return to it later. The surveys are anonymous; the instructor is made aware only of who has completed the form. Even this information, however, can be kept from the instructor by an administrator of the system.

From a faculty perspective, there are many options that can be controlled: How the questions are delivered, one at a time or all at once, the availability period for the questions, and the order of the questions. Most importantly, only the students on the WebCT classlist will have access to the online form. The feedback, both numerical and written is available only to the course teacher who can then decide who—if anyone—sees those comments. This latter control is very important and exceeds what is possible with a paper version.

Online teaching quality surveys incorporate many conveniences and tools that paper-based evaluations can’t provide. For faculty and students alike, online options, and the use of communication and information technology generally, are becoming increasingly convenient and popular. As they become more easily accessible, they become more developed and sophisticated. Combining the benefits of such technology with sound pedagogy provides the best possible learning and teaching experience.