New evaluation form with more individual focus
The school’s joint teaching evaluation form has just been revised. This has resulted in a new and shorter evaluation form and locally adapted follow-up processes at the departments. The purpose is to make the evaluation form a more useful tool for the lecturers, says head of the Aarhus BSS School Board of Studies Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz.
During the past six months, Aarhus BSS’ joint teaching evaluation form has been thoroughly revised. The purpose was to develop a shorter and more meaningful form, which can be adapted to the individual departments and lecturers. For this reason, students as well as lecturers in the different boards of studies as well as the boards’ representative in the Aarhus BSS School Board of Studies were deeply involved in the process.
The process has now resulted in a new evaluation form which - across the school - aims at meeting the different needs of the individual departments and lecturers - and which should also provide more useful answers. For one thing, the form contains fewer joint questions and more open-ended questions that allow the students to provide in-depth comments. In addition, the individual departments, boards of studies or lecturers are - to an even greater extent than before - encouraged to add additional questions to the form. In this way, you can adapt the form to your own teaching, and this makes a lot of sense, says Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz from the Department of Political Science, who is the head of the School Board of Studies:
“It’s very important that the lecturers feel that they actually benefit from using the evaluation form,” she says. ”And the more subject-specific and relevant the form is for the individual lecturer, the more useful it becomes. You might wish to evaluate specific aspects of your teaching, and this is possible if you add individual questions.”
Individual follow-up at the departments
The evaluation process itself is unchanged, which means that all the school’s courses must be evaluated each semester. However, the follow-up process has also been revised, and like the new evaluation form, this is now also much more locally based. From now on, there are no central requirements on how the departments and the directors of studies should follow up on the evaluation results. This must now be decided by the departments, says vice-dean for education Per Andersen:
“The most important thing is that you follow up on the evaluation results, the good as well as less as the good, and that no lecturer is left alone with their evaluations,” he emphasises. “As a lecturer, you might feel vulnerable in the evaluation process, and this must be dealt with by the director of studies or the course coordinator. They could for example engage in a close and constructive dialogue with the lecturer. To sum up, it’s important that the evaluation process doesn’t just strengthen the quality of our degree programmes, but is also tool that the lecturers can use to develop their courses and their teaching.”
The evaluation process
The new evaluation form will come into use in the autumn semester in the final evaluations of all courses. During the autumn, all lecturers will receive the evaluation form along with a thorough introduction to the evaluation process. However, lecturers are encouraged to discuss the learning objectives of the course, etc with the students at the very first lesson. This discussion can form the basis for the interim evaluation where lecturers are encouraged to discuss the goal, outcome and process with the students before the final evaluation takes place on the second-last lesson. Read more about the evaluation process.
Find additional questions in CUL’s question bank
To make it easier for the lecturers to add their own questions to the new evaluation form, the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CUL) has developed a question bank. Here you can find a number of additional questions that you are welcome to use.