Course evaluation is central to the requirements of both the Quality Assurance Agency and the General Medical Council to foster and encourage course improvement. At King’s College London we use a combination of bespoke web forms designed by technical staff and optically marked paper forms to collect course evaluation data. Traditional paper-based evaluation forms are costly to produce and time consuming to collate and analyse. The web is an ideal medium for the collection and analysis of data, especially with increasing student intakes across the UK higher education sector. Designing web forms, however, is time consuming and requires a level of technical expertise.
We have designed a web-based user-friendly interface that allows course tutors and administrative staff to design course evaluation and feedback forms that automatically collect and collate results. The interface consists of a web-based form builder, style tools and results display. The system, once installed on a central web server, runs in current web browsers without the need for third-party software or support. No prior knowledge of web-authoring or web-form processing is required. Based on a Microsoft Access database and Internet Information Services (IIS) web server interface, the form is generated by entering the questions and question format using drop-down menus. Common question formats are provided: radio buttons using a standard Likert scale, short answer, free text and yes/no/don’t know. The staff member designing the questionnaire can use pre-defined styles or change colours and font sizes by using styling tools. Results are collected in a database and after a pre-determined deadline has been reached, can be accessed via a web display page. The analysed data includes the number of responses, percentage spread, average mean and standard deviation. Full results, including free text comments, can be downloaded into any standard spreadsheet software for further analysis if required.
The project has been successfully piloted within the medical and dental courses for end-of-year course evaluation. The system has also been used for the collection of dental clinical feedback and ad hoc questionnaires. To date, ten forms have been created using the system, there have been 1212 evaluation form submissions from students, and 53 684 individual results have been collected and processed automatically. The system will be available to other Schools in the College and, if further funding is obtained, to other institutions. Future developments will include restricting submissions to one per questionnee for non-anonymous submissions and increased statistical and graphical display of collated results. CEFOL can be viewed at:
www.kcl.ac.uk/teares/gktvc/vc/CEFOL/
Teachingr Schools in the College and, if further funding is obtained, to other institutions. Future developments will include restricting submissions to one per questionnee for non-anonymous submissions and increased statistical and graphical display of collated results. CEFOL can be viewed at:
www.kcl.ac.uk/teares/gktvc/vc/CEFOL/