Online course and instructor evaluations

Evaluation of courses and instructors has become a fixture of most onsite, traditional college courses. At semester’s end, students typically complete a standardized institutional evaluation form that asks them to evaluate how well the course was designed, taught, and assessed by their instructor. Most forms ask students to report opinions about their instructor’s knowledge and teaching abilities. In recent years, many institutions have moved these standardized forms to an online environment for easy student access and data collection and analysis. Along with this move has come the online report of student satisfaction with both the course and instructor performance. Using these online reports, students can learn how other students have felt about their learning in a course or from a particular instructor. Informing other students, however, is just one purpose of course and instructor evaluation; instructors use these evaluations to improve future iterations of their courses, and tenure and promotion committees and administrators consider student evaluations when making personnel decisions about instructors. Because of their varied uses, most administrators, instructors, and students acknowledge the value of course evaluations, and they have become a common, if not always popular, component in courses.