Challenges

Evaluation response rates



Primary challenge owner: University of Tilburg

Secondary challenge owner(s): None

 

Background

It has been a struggle to get a good amount of responses for course and lecturer evaluations at the end of the course. A low response rate means that evaluation results are of no- to little value. Therefore, the university department would like to find ways to get the response rate up, but also to increase the quality of feedback in open-ended questions.

Feedback is important to be able to improve our education. Student evaluations are filled out by students to evaluate the course and their lecturer. The course should make the lecturers and students feel involved, and the added value of their feedback has a real impact on the continuous improvement of courses and their studies.

It seems that since the introduction of a new evaluation tool (TiU broad) the response rates have further deteriorated rather than improved – which is what we had hoped with the change to a more user-friendly evaluation system. The current median response rate is around 15%, which is too low for most courses.

Some thoughts of the Tilburg University why response rates are low at the moment:

  • According to literature, students are unaware of what happens with these evaluations, and how they are used. Course coordinators rarely report back to students what their reaction is to the feedback of students or what they intend to change in the course as a result of the feedback.
  • Some reasons can be technically addressed (e.g. notifications can now too easily be ignored by students)
  • Students’ involvement in their studies seems to have weakened due to the distant education of the past two years (noting the low show-up at on-campus lectures).
  • Lecturers pay less attention to the fact how important feedback is.
  • There is no (intrinsic) motivation to fill out the evaluations.

 

The question/ the challenge to startups

Contribute to the increase of response rates to acceptable levels of course and teacher evaluations to gather usable feedback and data which can be used to improve the quality of education.

 

Criteria:

  • Target group is ideally students and lecturers. They both need to be ‘stimulated/ rewarded’:
    • students to fill out the evaluations;
    • lecturers to pay attention and act upon the feedback if possible.
  • The solution has to connect or coexist with the existing tools that are currently

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