A Web-based Centralized System to Manage Student Feedback and Peer Evaluation at the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Ruhuna

Abstract

Student feedback and peer evaluations are integral parts of the tertiary education systems. The response of the teacher to student feedback and peer evaluations depends on the teacher’s perceptions and professionalism. Despite the personal biases, effective internalization of the feedback-response cycle is necessary to improve the teaching and learning process of academic institutions. Conventionally, paper-based questionnaires are used to obtain student feedback on teaching, courses and peer evaluation. Recent developments in Information and Communication Technology provide many avenues to carry out these questionnaire-based surveys through online services. Teachers prefer to use such services over paper-based questionnaires because of their intuitive interfaces, easy sharing and result analysis tools. Since individual teachers have full control over the student feedback data in most of the online tools, it is difficult to verify whether the teacher has responded to the feedback adequately. A centrally administered student feedback and peer evaluation system could collect responses and convey them to the management for further actions such as guiding and advising the teachers or improving the courses. Aforementioned tasks can be accomplished easily using tailor-made MIS or LMS and development of such systems could be costly and time consuming. This paper proposes an online system using Google forms as an interim solution to centrally handle the student feedback and peer evaluations at the faculty level. Since the proposed services are currently free to use, the faculties can easily adopt them if a local system is not in place. The feedback collected by the system will be processed by the IQAC of the Faculty of Agriculture using the functions of Google sheets. A custom-made summary of the feedback will be shared securely with the respective teacher and the head of the department (HOD) for further actions. This proposal was approved by the Faculty Board and yet to be implemented and validated.