Previously, Rene collected feedback from his students through a simple invitation on Canvas. This year, he took a different approach: “For the first time, we dedicated time during the last seminar to personally ask students, in addition to the usual invitation, to fill out the feedback forms, to receive more responses. This led to a significant increase in the participation rate because students were directly addressed and could complete the evaluations immediately. It’s important to note that attendance in these seminars is mandatory. For courses where seminars are not compulsory, low participation rates remain a challenge. However, I still try to motivate these students to provide feedback. I aim to embrace and promote VU's core values, such as openness and constructive feedback, in my teaching and among my students.”
Evalytics: practical tips & tricks
Digital course evaluations, like those conducted with the Evalytics programme used at VU, offer valuable feedback, especially through open-ended questions. Rene on the evaluation programme: “Frequent comments can provide real insights into what’s happening in your courses and among your students. A high student participation rate is crucial, and the programme’s user-friendliness plays a significant role in this for both teachers and students. For me as a teacher, Evalytics is very user-friendly: the standard questions are well-formulated, it’s easy to customize the questionnaire for a specific course, and the way feedback is given, works well.”
Here are some tips for using Evalytics:
- Proactive approach: inform your students about the importance of evaluations, not just for you as a teacher, but also for the curriculum committee. Be transparent about the value of their feedback and explain how it helps improve your teaching. Show students that their feedback is used by sharing what changes have been made, based on their input. This can help increase the response rate, because students see the value and feel involved. A quick comment after an exam like ‘fill this in’, is ineffective because students just want to go home.
- Avoid evaluation fatigue: limit the number of additional questions, and add variety to the question formats to make the evaluation more engaging.
- Utilize the last lecture or seminar: integrate the completion of course evaluations into your final lecture. For example, ask a group of students to do this and address them directly during your lecture.
- Share insights and best practices among colleagues: exchange successful tips and insights with fellow teachers to learn from each other and increase response rates.
- Provide feedback to students and share results: show your students what happens with their feedback. You can do this by discussing the results during the first class of the course or through a message on Canvas. Evalytics has a built-in feature that allows you to automatically provide feedback to students.
Do you also want to get the most out of Evalytics? Read more about using Evalytics.