Instructor and class evaluations go online

Students at Salt Lake Community College will soon see a change in how they evaluate the instructors. The system of using hard copies of evaluations is on its way out. Soon student will be able evaluate their instructors online.

The hard copy evaluations took months to get results, and were costly to the college, according to Ray Emett, the Director of Institutional Research.

The online evaluations will also give the college quicker results. This means they can be used efficiently to help in the hiring of instructors.

"Many times I've had students who would say 'Well why didn't I get to evaluate you?' or 'Why didn't I get to evaluate this class?'. Not every class is evaluated every semester on the current system. It would be too expensive, too costly, and we would have to have twice the staff we have in Institutional Research to do that," said Emett.

Starting Nov. 30 students will be able to do evaluations for every class they are taking. This will be found on their mypage account. A new tab will appear at the top of the page.

"I feel like the best way for a teacher to improve is to get feedback from the class. And I feel like as students we have better access to it online," said Coco James, SLCC student.

The new evaluations have three parts. The initial part of the evaluation is about 15 questions. This part is used for the instructor's personnel review. The instructor customizes the second part, to have any additional question they would like asked. Third is the student-shared section.

"For students, the great advantage of this is that we have a student section that will be shared with students. I guess its our version of pickaprof or Ratemyprofessor.com, but instead of having useless things like a chili pepper rating, we have questions that will help you match your learning style with the teaching style of the teacher in the class," said Emett.

Students will be able see what past students said about the course and instructor. A link in the online class schedule will take students to past student answers to question such as:

How often were the following used in this class? Lecture, in-class exercises, test and quizzes.

How often was the textbook used as part of this course?

How often did the instructor cancel class?

"The evaluations are helpful for me as faculty because I look at different areas where students liked and disliked my classes, and make modifications from there," said Tyler Smith, communications faculty at SLCC.

One problem that the evaluations might run into is that they will no longer be done in class. While this will save class time, it will be left up to the student to do the evaluations on their own time.

"I will for sure. I have ran into some nasty teachers that I think if they had better evaluations, maybe I wouldn't have run to them or they could have had the opportunity to improve," said James.

"Yeah, I would rather do it online anyways," said Kristi Wayman, SLCC student.

Some evaluations will still be done with the hard copy, but for most classes they will be online.

The evaluations will start on Nov. 30 and will end before finals. Prizes will be given out to random students who take part in this evaluation this semester.