Evaluations

Harnessing Information Technology to Improve the Process of Students' Evaluations of Teaching: An Exploration of Students' Critical Success Factors of Online Evaluations Dorit jcevo Ron McClean Schulich School of Business York University, Toronto, ON, Canada dnevo@yorku.ca rmcclean@schulich .yorku.ca Saggt Neve School of Business University at Albany, Albany. NY snevo@uamail.albany.edu ABSTRACT This paper discusses the relative advantage offered by online Students' Evaluations of Teaching (SET) and describes a study conducted at a Canadian university 10 identify critical success factors of onl ine evaluations from students' point of view. Factors identified as important by the students include anonymity, ease of US(' (of both SET survey andsystem), accessibility, publicati on of results, subsequent adjustments to the course, SET survey redesign, system reliability, incentives, reminders, and conveying the importance of the SET survey to students. We discuss key implications of the factors identified to faculty and survey administrators.

To me this article stresses the importance of continuous feedback. I think the structure of the tutoring website is such that it allows for continuous feedback on a daily basis. If the instructors log-in to the website they will see the questions that students are asking on chat or in the forum and these concepts are the ones that students are struggling with. This can lead to more explanation of the material or maybe a different explanation.

Important Points from the article:

Relative advantage is an important concept in innovation diffusion and it refers to the extent to which an innovation is perceived to be better than its precursor (Rogers 2003).

We suggest that a key relative advantage arises from the importance of an effective feedback mechanism, which allo....." both faculty and students to adapt their behaviour and, more speci fically, enables faculty to use the feedback to obtain their teaching and professional goals, (p.100)

Research has shown that the immediacy of feedback is positively associated with its usefulness (Dune and Otidambaram 1999). Moreover, the shorter the time elapsed between actions of students and responses of instructors the better the student Iearning and Course satisfaction (Arbaugh 2001). Thus, it ,.."would appear that an instructor who receives immediate feedback on her teaching - and acts upon this feedback - is more likely to be perceived as an effective teacher (p.100 section 2.1)

Therefore, it appears that integrating the feedback mechanism into the process (e.g., teaching) and providing it on an ongoing basis, rather than as a singular event, would be more conducive to directing the system (in this case, the instructor) responsible for the execution of the process (Nadler 1976). (p.101 section 2.3)