CAT has just wrapped up our season of midcourse reviews. After piloting the online midcourse reviews last spring, we offered this service to all of our online instructors this fall during the same period as our face to face ones. In fact, the procedure is quite similar to the face to face midcourse review. We create a questionnaire on Survey Monkey for each instructor who requests the online midcourse review using the following three questions:
1. What is working in the online course (what is helping you to learn)?
2. What is not working(what is keeping you from learning)?
3. What are your suggestions for improvement?
We then send to the instructors the unique link for his or her students, along with a message from CAT explaining what the review is, why the instructor is requesting it and of course, the fact that the survey is completely anonymous.
We keep the survey open for a few days and once it's closed, we create the midcourse review report which summarizes the student feedback and delete the survey. We then meet with the online instructor either face to face or via videoconference and discuss the report. Like the face to face midcourse reviews, CAT does not keep copies of the reports.
So, if you're teaching online in the near future and would like to take advantage of this service, don't worry! We'll contact our online instructors each semester to remind you.
