Student feedback from beginning to end: a new course evaluation model

Courses and their instructors are commonly evaluated by students with end of term standardized questionnaires. While the results may be indicative of overall student perception, they represent a single time-point and have limited value for faculty attempting to gather feedback for such things as course redesign. We have developed a model that is intended to gather comprehensive, targeted feedback across the entire course. In this model a team of student volunteers is solicited to observe and reflect upon the course content, assessments, objectives and quality of instruction throughout the term. The student volunteers remained anonymous to the instructor and communicated solely with intermediary facilitators (in our case a University Teaching Fellow and a Centre for Teaching Excellence staff member) for the entire process, which includes start of term, midterm and end-of-course meetings. In this session we will explain the model and share our experiences from our pilots in a fourth year undergraduate biology course, pre- and post- course redesign, and a first year physics course. We will reflect on our overwhelmingly positive experience with the process and the richness of the feedback gathered, from both the perspective of the instructor and facilitators. We will also share some of the student volunteers’ perceptions. We will solicit thoughts from audience members around the use of this model more broadly for guiding course redesign and for gathering more valuable and specific feedback than end of term surveys