Electronic evaluation for all Winter 2020 classes were made available to students April 10.
Jeff Peters, MCCC’s coordinator of E-Learning and Instructional support was contacted over video call to explain the process of converting the surveys to a digital format.
Evaluation Kit is a tool the college has used for several years to conduct end-of-semester course questionnaires for all online and blended classes; this tool would also be used for on-ground class evaluations, Peters said.
The plan to convert these surveys digitally was put in place well before the pandemic caused the college to move the current semester’s courses online.
“It’s come up several times over the years, about ‘why don’t we try to get away from paper-based?’” Peters said.
The E-Learning office typically communicates with professors before a semester starts about possible use of online sources such as a Brightspace course. The choice for a professor to use online or paper questionnaires for future semesters will be included in these talks.
The college’s Instructional Technologies Committee, compromised of staff and faculty of the college, recently put forth a proposal that switching to the online questionnaire should be optional; professors would have the option to keep using paper questionnaires or utilize the electronic version instead.
The committee took the proposal to the Councils and met with no resistance, Peters said.
The time that could be saved in class by allowing students to complete surveys online on their own time was part of the proposal the Instructional Technologies Committee presented.
“The twist for this semester is that we’re going to conduct all of them using the online format because we’re not meeting on-ground,” Peters said.
The on-ground classes that were converted to online will have the same questions that the paper evaluations had.
There was a Brightspace announcement released to students April 9, stating the questionnaires will be available to students from April 10 to April 20.
Reminders will be issued through multiple emails while the evaluations are still open to take.
The evaluations can be accessed on a computer, tablet or smartphone.
Filling the evaluation out is optional, though strongly encouraged for accurate feedback.
“There are other colleges that make it mandatory, that tie receiving your grades to the completion of it,” Peters said. “But we haven’t wanted to get that draconian.”
Anyone who has questions or difficulty with the online questionnaires can contact the E-Learning help desk at elearning@monroeccc.edu.
