Jeff Gulbronson and Ola Suchon, Course Critiques Directors
Pat Duong, VP Academic
Gordon Stubley, Associate Dean Teaching
Hey engineers, it’s that time again! The Faculty of Engineering course evaluation period opened yesterday (Tuesday, July 4) and will close Friday, July 14. Your professors and instructors will be asking you to give feedback on your learning experiences, and we’re asking you to take those requests seriously.
Course evaluations, known as Course Critiques in Engineering, are a key mechanism in getting student feedback. Instructors use scores and written comments to help improve their courses and their overall teaching. Chairs and Directors use scores to make hiring and promotion decisions. The feedback of past students has informed the learning experiences you’ve encountered in your program, and your feedback this term will have an impact on the learning experience of future engineers.
Engineering will again be using UW’s course evaluation platform, Evaluate (https://evaluate.uwaterloo.ca), for the majority of your course evaluations. Of the 16,524 questionnaires being generated this term, only 413 are paper; that’s 16,111 paper questionnaires and 253 envelopes & instruction sheets that we don’t have to consume, and that’s amazing!
The electronic system is the first step toward a new comprehensive evaluation system that will provide instructors of varied course components – labs, projects, seminars, lectures, team-taught, online and other types of courses – with meaningful student feedback. We anticipate the introduction of a new set of core questions that are applicable to all course experiences plus additional question sets that are specific to different teaching modes. This will give instructors of all types of courses an instrument for gathering valuable student feedback.
Last fall, A-Soc achieved an incredible overall response rate of 66%, which was higher than the average rate for the previous 13 years, and much higher than the 58% achieved by B-Soc in winter 2017! We’d love to see that momentum continue – if we can maintain these high response rates, paper evaluations will definitely remain in the past.
From now until July 14, students will be given class time to complete Course Critiques electronically. Make sure you find out from your professors when you’ll be given class time so that you can bring your web-enabled phone, tablet or laptop to class, and take Evaluate for a spin.
Please complete all of your Course Critiques – future engineers are counting on you!
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