Through its program of Teaching Questionnaires (TQ), E&E helps UM instructors, departments, and schools to design custom questionnaires for use in evaluating teaching. Before the fall term of 2008, E&E each year printed nearly 500,000 TQ forms for teachers in more than 16,000 classes. In the fall of 2008, the TQ program became a paperless operation. Students on the Ann Arbor campus now fill out their TQ forms on the Web.
E&E has prepared additional materials to guide users of the TQ system:
- a calendar of important teaching evaluation dates;
- a slide presentation on online evaluations for classroom and individual use;
- guidelines for teachers using online evaluations in their classes;
- a report on response rates in online evaluation systems;
- answers to frequently asked questions.
Background
The TQ system was developed at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching in 1976 under the direction of Dr. James A. Kulik. Originally a computer-based system for collecting students evaluations on individually printed forms, the TQ system became a paperless operation in the fall of 2008. Planning for the paperless version of TQ began almost a decade earlier. From the fall of 2002 to the winter of 2005, E&E carried out pilot studies on online evaluations. In the fall of 2006 Provost Teresa Sullivan appointed a task force to study online evaluation systems. In March 2007 a report from the task force recommended that the University develop a paperless, online course evaluation system. In partnership with staff from Information Technology Systems (ITS) and CTools, E&E implemented this online system in the fall of 2008.
On April 20, 2009, six days after the start of the winter-term evaluation period, the CTools system experienced serious performance issues, and two days before the evaluation period was scheduled to end, the University made the decision to terminate the collection of evaluations . Since then, ITS and CTools teams have worked extensively to improve the data collection system so that a premature closure of TQ submissions in the future is extremely unlikely. More information about planning for 2009 online evaluations is available in an online report.
Program Components
Among the services provided by the TQ program are the following:
- Questionnaire Design. Instructors and departments design TQ forms by selecting relevant items from a large catalog of course evaluation questions. A downloadable copy of this item catalog is available online in Adobe Acrobat format. TQ forms can contain up to 30 rating questions and up to 5 open-ended comment questions.
- Data collection. Students typically complete evaluations during the last full week of classes. At the beginning of the week, students receive emails directing them to My Workspace pages in CTools where they find their course evaluation forms. Students who do not complete evaluations continue to receive reminder emails until they fill out their evaluations, or until the evaluation period ends.
- Reporting. Instructors are able to view evaluation results in their Faculty Center websites on Wolverine Access. The results are presented in three reports: a summary report that tabulates all quantitative ratings on a single page; a combined summary report that includes both quantitative ratings and all student comments; and a detailed report that displays individual student comments and associated ratings in multi-page format.
- Interpretation. E&E also provides a guide for instructors to use in interpreting results.
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