Moving student evaluation of teaching online: Reporting pilot outcomes and issues with a focus on how to increase student response rates
Beverley Olivera, Beatrice Tuckera, Christina Ballantyneb & David Collingsb,
aCurtin University of Technology and bMurdoch University, Perth, Western Australia
Two Western Australian universities have made the decision to move their student evaluation systems online. Their two, quite different, systems have been trialled and will be extended across the universities later this year. At Curtin, student evaluation is one part of a triangulated system for providing feedback about student learning and teaching which includes curriculum review processes, student feedback, and peer mentoring. eVALUate is Curtin’s new online system for gathering and reporting student evaluation of learning and teaching. This online instrument is unique because it uses an instrument that is focused on students’ perceptions of what helped and hindered their achievement of unit learning outcomes. Murdoch University has a different history with student evaluation, having run a mandatory system since 1993 with online surveys running in selected areas of the university over the last seven years. Questions included in the survey instrument are based on Murdoch’s Quality Unit Standards and have been revised for MOSS, the new online system.
The purpose of the trials in each institution was to: 1) test the online data gathering system, 2) provide a large sample with which to validate the instrument and 3) test the response rate in the online mode. Ninety-three units at Curtin, and eighty-three at Murdoch were evaluated with average response rates of 25% and 45% respectively. This paper compares and contrasts the experience of each institution from the pilot studies. The presentation concludes with suggestions as to how universities can gain better response rates in online systems.
Keywords: evaluation; online; response rate.
Notes on Contributors
Beverley Oliver and Beatrice Tucker work in the Teaching Development Unit which is leading the development and implementation of Curtin’s eVALUate system. Christina Ballantyne and David Collings are based in the Teaching and Learning Centre at Murdoch University and are responsible for the Student Surveys of Teaching and Units. They have both been instrumental in creating MOSS (Murdoch Online Survey System).
Address for correspondence
Beverley Oliver, Teaching Development Unit, Curtin University of Technology, GPO Box U1987, Perth, Western Australia 6845, .
Copyright statement
Copyright will remain with the author. By submitting an abstract to the conference the authors grant the University of New South Wales permission to publish this document on the World-wide Web and in printed form within the Evaluation Forum 2005 proceedings and program.