Assessing teaching effectiveness can provide educators with valuable insights into learning and facilitate continuous improvement in the instructional process. Feedback, whether positive or constructive, is a powerful tool that enables facilitators to refine their courses and teaching methods, both during and after the semester.

Formative Evaluations:

Formative evaluations serve the purpose of assessing the ongoing development of a course or program, including its materials, exercises, and overall instructional design.

Summative Evaluations:

Summative evaluations, on the other hand, aim to measure the overall success of a course or program, gauging whether the design and implementation have led to improved learning outcomes.

To gather feedback from students, you can create a questionnaire using the following steps:

1. Turn on editing for the course.

2. In the section where you want to add the questionnaire, select the "Add an activity or resource" menu.

3. Choose the "Questionnaire" activity.

4. Provide a name for the questionnaire and edit the description as needed.

5. Set the availability by defining start and end dates.

6. Configure response options, such as whether users can respond once, daily, weekly, monthly, or unlimited times, display their identities, view all responses, receive submission notifications, save their answers before submission, utilize branching questions, enable auto-numbering for pages and questions, and set submission grading.

7. Set common module settings to determine the survey's availability and group settings.

8. Configure access restrictions if necessary.

9. Set activity completion criteria, whether tracked manually or automatically.

10. Define competencies if applicable.

11. Click "Save and return to course" or "Save and display" at the bottom of the page.

Adding Different Types of Questions:

You can include various question types in your questionnaire, such as checkboxes, date fields, dropdown boxes, essay boxes (with HTML editing options), labels, numeric fields (with customizable length and decimal places), radio buttons (with custom labels for each question), rating scales (highly customizable), text boxes, and yes/no questions. For detailed information about each question type, refer to the support document from FacDev.

Exporting Responses:

The responses collected in the questionnaire can be exported in multiple formats, including .csv, .xlsx, HTML tables, .json, .ord, or PDF. Detailed settings for questionnaires can be found in the support document from FacDev.

Feedback vs. Questionnaire:

In addition to questionnaires, educators can use the Feedback tool to gather comments and enhance the overall course experience. Both Feedback and Questionnaire activities are user-friendly for teachers but differ in their application. Questionnaires allow you to incentivize students with a grade upon completion, while Feedback activities are typically ungraded. Moreover, each tool supports different question types to suit your specific evaluation needs. For further details about these tools, please consult the support team from FacDev at facdev@mcmaster.ca.