The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in abrupt and dramatic changes to instructors’ teaching experiences in the Spring 2020 Semester. In response to this situation and in consultation with the faculty senate and the deans, some changes have been made in content and process to course evaluations for this semester. These changes acknowledge faculty concerns about potential effects from this semester on promotion and tenure evaluations while continuing to provide a way for students to give meaningful feedback to faculty.
In collaboration, OIRSA and CITL identified a set of open-ended questions listed below that will comprise the Lehigh course evaluation for the spring 2020 semester. There will be no closed-ended/scaled items on this semester’s core set of course evaluation questions. Spring 2020 course evaluations will be administered through EvaluationKIT in the usual way for students. TA evaluations will be handled in the same manner.
Spring 2020 Course Evaluation Questions
- What aspects of this course and your instructor's teaching helped you the most?
- Of the modifications made mid-semester to this course, which contributed most to your remote learning in this course?
- What specific recommendations would you give to the instructor to improve student learning in the course?
- How satisfied are you with your own efforts in the course?
- What is the most important thing you learned in this course that you will carry forward with you?
Any custom questions or specific “evaluation window” faculty and instructional staff had already requested will still be administered unless instructors notify OIRSA.
Once student responses are collected (and grades have been posted), OIRSA will make the pdfs (course summaries) available only to instructors and TAs via EvaluationKIT (https://go.lehigh.edu/evalkit). Instructors and TAs will need to log-in as usual to retrieve their course summaries, and these summaries will be available only to instructors and TAs for a limited time of 2 weeks. In addition, pdfs will be emailed to the instructors' department chair for developmental rather than evaluative purposes. Department coordinators will only receive the TA summaries. Please note, that for spring 2020, OIRSA staff, instructors and TAs will be the only ones able to retrieve their summaries directly from EvaluationKIT during the 2-week time frame. The data collected will then be removed from the system so that it will not pass through Lyterati for promotion and tenure portfolios. Be sure to save the pdf(s) you retrieve from EvaluationKIT if you want to keep it because the data will not remain in the system for access on demand after the end of the 2-week period. OIRSA will maintain a backup pdf for faculty who may want to retrieve it for their own purposes at a later date.
If you have any questions regarding the process, please reach out to OIRSA via email (inevals@lehigh.edu) and someone will respond within two business days. We acknowledge many changes have been implemented in recent weeks, and this adds to the list. However, we realize that faculty and instructors may benefit from the feedback students provide via course evaluations, and this is the main reason for continuing providing this service to the University. Thank you for your cooperation and for all that you do.
Patrick Farrell, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
Yenny Anderson, Vice Provost for Institutional Research and Strategic Analytics