Teaching Evaluations
Our program has seven week classes since we started teaching all of our courses 100% online. This wasn’t a decision that was fueld by immediate response to COVID. It was merely coincident with the outbreak of COVID.
In addition, we teach many classes that are lovingly called cohorts or collaboratives. My head hurts already, so please don’t ask me to define the difference. In very brief, these sections of classes are populated with folks who are full time teachers in public schools. Some of the cohorts are robust and overfull. Others are less so. And that’s fine, because the enrollment in any given section is above eight. Except, when folks fall out of sequence with their cohort for some reason. (e.g. getting really sick, or having a baby, or dealing with a traumatic life event). Let’s call this Case B.
The University has rules about how many folks from a given section have to respond before the results can be released. Which is appropriate. I want folks to respond with candor, and sometimes that means they might say some blunt, honest things. I think the limit is five responses from any section, but any number around there will work for my purposes.
This session, I’m teaching one class (don’t get envious. my second session is going to be pretty rough). However, that class of nine folks is made up of five sections, two sections of Case B students who cannot become a common section for (insert bureaucratic) reasons, one section of five folks, and one section of folks that are taking the course as an independent study.
Because of the limits on responders, and the online ability to merge multiple course section identifiers into a single section, I am numerically prevented from receiving student evaluations. Some folks despise student evaluations. I think there is merit to them so long as you maintain perspective on what they are, and what you can do with the information gleaned from them.
It’s just an example of a program trying to help students accomplish their goals, but running up against restrictions and bureaucracy that makes certain components of the problem a little bit tricky to deal with.
All in a day, I guess…