Daily course evaluation with Google forms

Abstract

Student course evaluation has become a fixture of American higher education over the past two generations. It serves at least two distinct purposes: to provide superiors with a way to assess the quality of each instructor, and to avail the instructor a chance to improve, based on feedback from students. A third motivation is to give students a way to influence teaching. Almost invariably, the evaluation is performed once per term, and the end of each course. Both the instructor's and students' purposes, it would be much better if the feedback came at a point where instruction could be adjusted during the current term. It would be ideal be to collect feedback after each class. Until recently, the overhead of doing so was high enough to render daily feedback infeasible. But now, with Google forms, anyone can create and administer surveys for free, and with minimal investment of time. This paper reports on a semester-long experiment with daily feedback, and how it influenced instruction. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2010.