Fall mid-term evaluations
The start of every year brings a new challenge and additional ‘flavour ’with it. Large numbers of freshmen come in, populating lecture and tutorial rooms, sharing their enthusiasm with each other and with older students, ‘camping’ in de cafeteria, and inside and outside the Wijnhaven building.
At least, that is how it used to be until the pandemic broke into our lives. In the ‘new reality’, the physical contact in the building has been reduced since the gross majority of lectures and tutorials have been taking place online.
To cope with this situation and to guarantee the teaching quality we were used to, our students, tutors and lecturers have been working very hard to adapt teaching strategies to online reality. This meant investing in many hours of meetings and trainings to critically revise existing assignments and readings, and designing new ones that would match the new online reality facilitated by the Kaltura and Brightspace platforms. Assessing the current Fall semester teaching by holding mid-term tutorial evaluations became therefore even more relevant than it was the case in previous years.
In general, comments made by students on the evaluations show their great satisfaction with the tutors’ professionalism and expertise, and with the good organization of tutorials. This was no different from other years. Since interaction, engagement, and cooperation are crucial requirements in our teaching, in-class debates and workgroup exercises held on campus and in Kaltura break-out rooms have proved their invaluable role in both on-campus and online tutorials.
A few points for improvement mentioned by students deserve our attention for coming semester. One of them is the necessity to better streamline the accessibility of the different documents on Brightspace. Another one is the reduction of the number of small assignments held throughout the semester for first-year and second-year courses.
In the case of some first year courses, the adaptation of in-class exercises to online teaching turned out to be more challenging than initially expected. This was, for example, the case with quizzes used to assess students’ knowledge in Sociolinguistics and Principles of Economics. Due to failing internet connections, some students found it difficult to answer questions within the time set which partly affected their grades .
To accommodate this situation, the Sociolinguistics team consulted with the study coordinators and decided that students would be allowed a resit by doing an MC online exam that will take place half January. This grade will then replace the existing one for the quizzes. In the case of Principles of Economics, tutors (re)designed the questions for the quizzes held in the second part of the semester to become less time-consuming and more straightforward.
More than anything else, the mid-term evaluations have reiterated the willingness of students to provide their input and the receptivity of tutors to improve any necessary matters concerning tutorials.
This is precisely the cooperation desired between everyone involved in any education environment and most particularly in an online situation.
Paula Jordão
(Head of Tutor Team)