Online Course Peer Review

Five or six years ago, LSC faculty participated in a duty day at the DECC which featured an outstanding keynote speaker (unfortunately, I fail to remember his name).  The gist of his presentation was that we need to step out of our comfort zones and be brave enough to ask students for their honest feedback about our courses.  Of course, we already do this with our course evaluations at the end of each semester — but his message was that we should aim to gather feedback frequently throughout a semester.  Of course, student confidentiality is key here.  In online courses, we could create an anonymous forum on the discussion board or develop a quick survey using a free online survey tool (surveygizmo.com or zoomerang.com are two I like).

Why should we take the extra few minutes to create a forum for our students to provide feedback to us?  As educators and, dare I say, especially as online educators, we are establishing an environment for learning that must be easily navigable and understood.  We want to prevent student frustration with the online platform and encourage interest and curiousity in the discipline we’re teaching.  If students are provided a forum for expressing their concerns about course navigability, etc., we can take quick steps to improve the set up of our courses.  Waiting to hear about frustrations at the very end of a semester isn’t going to help out our current students much!

I’ve learned so much in my role as the online course peer review coordinator.  One of the most important – and I learned it first by having one of my own courses reviewed – is that we as instructors think our courses are easy to understand and navigate (heck, we created them, so of course they make sense!).  Our students, however, generally have very good ideas for improvements.

So consider challenging yourself to step out of that comfort zone for a bit, and ask for student feedback along the way.  Along those same lines and just as important, volunteer to get involved in the online course peer review process.  Having a course reviewed will likely result in a higher quality course.  That’s what we’re all aiming for as instructors, right?!