The Office of Instructional Development will launch a pilot program for paperless evaluations fall quarter to increase efficiency and improve campus sustainability.
The OID provides the university’s student rating of instruction service, which currently uses a paper-and-pencil method for course evaluations at the end of each quarter. The pilot program will implement online evaluations in several departments and courses, which have yet to be identified, said Joanne Valli-Marill, OID associate director of evaluation and education assessment.
Online evaluations would allow department administrators and faculty to receive data from evaluations much faster, enabling departments to make changes for the following quarter, Valli-Marill said.
“Our department processes over 300,000 forms a year, so anything that can become more automated adds to our efficiency and also helps us better serve the faculty,” she added.
Implementing paperless evaluations would also free up valuable class time, said Thach Nguyen, former Undergraduate Students Association Council general representative.
“Those last 15 minutes of class that instructors have to spend on course evaluations is really inefficient and really does take away from important end-of-the-quarter class time that would otherwise be spent reviewing and preparing for finals,” Nguyen said.
The possibility of paperless evaluations was first discussed as far back as 2003, when the OID surveyed UCLA’s peer institutions in the Association of American Universities, a nonprofit association of public and private research universities in the U.S. and Canada.
For the past two years, the OID explored various online solutions that were available and also discussed the possibility of creating its own online program to implement paperless evaluations, Valli-Marill said.
“We looked at what was available and narrowed it down to a company that we’re going to do a pilot with to see whether or not this is something we want to move forward with,” she said.
Results from the pilot program will provide information about the best way to increase and maintain response rates, and what kind of effect online course evaluations will have on student ratings, Valli-Marill said.
“Professors pay a lot of attention to their evaluations and take them very seriously,” Valli-Marill said. “They have very valid concerns about how this change would impact their evaluations, and we want to address that.”
The push to transition from paper to paperless is also largely due to student sustainability efforts. Nguyen called for a campus-wide online evaluation system this past year as part of his office’s goal to improve campus sustainability.
“We saw that one of the main obstacles this project has faced in the past was that a lot of faculty members felt that online course evaluations would devalidate the quality of the evaluations,” Nguyen said. “Maybe less students would take them or maybe the evaluations won’t be as accurate.”
To gauge the validity of these concerns, Amanda Silver-Westrick, co-director of Nguyen’s sustainability committee, started an action research team through the UCLA Institute of the Environment to research the impact of transitioning to paperless evaluations during winter and spring quarters.
Through interviews with professors and more than 850 student responses, the action research team found that faculty and students alike were, for the most part, widely supportive of transitioning online, Silver-Westrick said.
“The appeal of an online system is that it really seems like a win-win situation,” Silver-Westrick said. “It doesn’t seem like we’d be making any sacrifices in order to improve environmental sustainability on campus, and an online system would be an improvement in so many ways.”
Silver-Westrick’s action research team presented its findings to the OID just as the office was seriously considering a school-wide transition to online for the 2010-2011 school year, a fact that reinforced OID’s decision to move ahead with a pilot program, Valli-Marill said.
“When we saw that these students were clearly in support of what we were doing, we knew that this was an issue that was so important to both the faculty and the students,” Valli-Marill said. “Our goal is to provide the best service for faculty that meets both their needs and the needs of the students.”