Active participation in course evaluations would improve overall education

Knee-deep in end-of-quarter papers and exams, students may forgo completing course evaluations on MyUCLA to use every minute for sleep and work.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, the response rate for online course evaluations has averaged around 42 percent or lower since the beginning of the pilot – a level this board feels is much too low, especially compared to the average response rate of paper evaluations, which is about 75 to 85 percent.

UCLA should foster a community of learning where all parties – instructors and students – are active participants. Students should partake in their education by giving feedback, allowing instructors to improve their courses as well as general teaching skills.

Since the pilot program to switch from in-class, paper course evaluations to online evaluations began in fall 2010, 78 departments and programs at UCLA have switched to the online method and 32 still use paper evaluations. Several more departments are joining the online system this spring.

We commend the Office of Instructional Development for launching what we think is a successful switch to online course evaluations. They are time- and cost-efficient: the program forgoes using staff to manually process the paper evaluations, and the turnaround rate for the results are faster.

Because online evaluations take less time to process, instructors can access the feedback more promptly and adjust their courses accordingly.

Now that UCLA has the technological means to compile and distribute thousands of evaluations in a fraction of the time it used to, both students and instructors should deliberate on how to improve feedback between the two parties through course evaluations.

Instructors should stress the importance of these evaluations in class and give frequent reminders to fill them out. Many students neglect the evaluations because they are not aware of how valuable they are, but they in fact affect the instructors’ development as teachers and whether a professor receives tenure.

Setting aside 10 to 15 minutes of class time for students to fill out evaluations is an even better way to ensure more student participation. While instructors may feel this will unduly take away from instruction time, especially under the 10-week quarter system in which every lecture counts, this would demonstrate the importance of feedback and a willingness of the instructor to facilitate the process.

The Office of Instructional Development could also look into using MyUCLA notices as a way to remind students. These notices appear when students log into MyUCLA before they can move onto their personalized home page, which might be better reminders than emails.

The university as a whole benefits from having an effective course evaluation system – a process that can improve through everyone’s contribution.