Student Feedback Using Adaptive Web Based Surveys

ABET’s Engineering Criteria 2000 has caused us to look much more seriously at what we teach, how we teach it, and particularly at how we assess the process and its results. This paper addresses the gathering, processing, and response to student feedback, a very important part of the quality control process. Most colleges of engineering have traditionally conducted end of course evaluations by students as a means of assessing the quality of teaching and the effectiveness of course structure and content. In addition, senior exit surveys provide an overall evaluation of the educational experience, while alumni surveys give some measure of the strengths and weaknesses of the program when tested in actual application. Our college is in the process of converting from paper based to web based survey systems because they are more flexible in structure and content, can be done at the student’s convenience, encourage more thoughtful and extensive responses, allow more extensive analysis of the data, provide timely results, and do not require a special processing agency or anyone to transcribe comments. After carefully looking at what several other universities have done in this area, we have developed a unique course and teaching evaluation survey system that is flexible, easy to use, and accessed by all users via a web browser. The system contains a library of different question and response formats, which are used to build a unique set of survey questions for each course based on the course structure. In addition, each instructor is encouraged to add a personal set of questions to their own course survey to gain additional feedback on their teaching methods, course content, or new tools or activities that were introduced. A major benefit of the course and teaching evaluation survey conducted via the web is that it can be used at any time during a course to provide in-process feedback and adjustments. Our experiences with this system are presented as well as the structure and programming methods of the web based system.