Your Course Evaluations Shape Columbia’s Courses

Course Evaluations

Spring 2012 course evaluations are now open in OASIS!

Students will receive reminder emails, and be reminded to complete their evaluations when they login to OASIS, until they complete all open course evaluations.

For more information on course evaluations, visit the FAQs.

At the end of every semester, students are inundated with surveys and course evaluations and of course, finals and final projects. Completing course evaluations for four, five or six courses can eat into a lot of valuable time toward the end of each semester. It’s easy to put course evaluations off or even skip doing them altogether. That would be a missed opportunity.

“The feedback I get from students is that they are frustrated because they don’t see an immediate and dramatic impact from their participation in our surveys and the course evaluations,” said Royal Dawson, Director of Institutional Research for the Office of Research, Evaluation and Planning. “I understand that because sometimes change is subtle and takes time. But please remember, without student participation, making changes and improvements is that much more difficult.”

In the same way that students expect and need faculty feedback on their coursework, faculty need student feedback to be able to evolve and improve the courses they teach.

The course evaluation is one of the best opportunities for students to directly impact the quality and content of their courses.
- Royal Dawson, Director of Institutional Research for the Office of Research, Evaluation and Planning

All student evaluation results are completely anonymous. Even if an instructor could somehow figure out who wrote an evaluation, instructors cannot see evaluation results until after their final grades have been submitted and the grading portal is closed.

“The course evaluation is one of the best opportunities for students to directly impact the quality and content of their courses,” said Dawson. “We want Columbia College to remain a student oriented institution, and it is difficult to accomplish that goal without student input.”

It may be hard for you to care about these evaluations if you never see a direct result. But in one case, student evaluations changed the way an entire course is done. Culture, Race, and Media,(CRM) a general education course in the Television department, is one example of that.

When students complained there was too much reading and writing for the course to be interesting, the course became more interactive in the past year.

As a result, Stan West, a CRM professor for the past two years, added a fishbowl to his class every three weeks to increase discussion and participation. Evaluations for his course don’t just happen at the end of each semester.

“I do self-assessments as well as offer students the chance to do assessments on me and the class in the beginning, middle, and the end,” he says. “After all, all stories have these time-based components and since our class would like to chronicle the narrative of when, if at all, students change their views of why these assessments are helpful.”