During the mid-semester crunch I often find myself busy with “keeping up” with grading and also thinking about the courses that I will teach next semester. However, it’s not too late to consider making small changes to my current courses, and one good way of doing that is to administer a mid-semester evaluation. There are a few different ways to administer a survey like this in a course, the easiest being through GoogleDocs, but it can also be done through Blackboard or through a survey tool such as Qualtrics. We have instructions for setting up surveys using various Chapman-licensed software, such as Blackboard and Qualtrics.

For the questions that you may want to consider asking on your evaluation, here are two samples with open-ended course evaluation questions that you can adapt for your own needs:

Sample GoogleForm (please make a copy to use for yourself)

Midterm Reflection Document (save to your local computer)

And here are some reference articles that you may also want to peruse, on this topic:

Parrish, G. (2016, Oct. 31). Transforming midterm evaluations into a metacognitive pause. Faculty Focus, Magna Publications.

Shadiow, L., & Weimer, M. (2015, Nov. 23). A New Twist on End-of-Semester Evaluations. Faculty Focus. Magna Publications.

As you are considering how you might make some small changes in your teaching this semester, I suggest that you watch this 3.5 minute talk from José Antonio Bowen about student thinking:

If, after watching, you find that you would like to hear more of Dr. Bowen’s ideas about teaching, I will give away copies of his book Teaching Naked to the first three Chapman instructors who send me an email (remy@chapman.edu) explaining why they would like to know how their students “feel about water” (note: this prompt will make sense after you watch the video).

Happy Teaching!,

Jana Remy
Director, Educational Technology
Co-Director, Institute for Excellence in Teaching & Learning