By Provost Brent Snow
Each fall and spring, we invite our students to evaluate their individual courses and instructors through our Student Rating of Instruction system. This system has opened for Fall 2014. The feedback we receive from students is significant in a number of ways.
- It helps us to evaluate the performance of our instructors and create strategies for their professional development, which allows us to improve the quality of our courses and programs from year to year.
- It helps us to determine whether our course content is as relevant and appropriate as it can be to our students.
- It helps us to identify learning technologies and resources which are meeting student needs.
In short, the feedback we receive from you—the student—helps us to provide you with a better course experience in future semesters, and also helps us build courses and programs that you’ll be proud to recommend to family and friends.
We are often asked about the anonymity of the SRI process. Let me assure you that no one—not your instructor, and not any administrator—can associate you personally with the feedback you provide. In addition, neither your instructor nor the administrators see any SRI results at all beyond participation rates until after grades have been submitted for the semester.
The Student Rating of Instruction process is all upside—for the university, for your instructors, for you, and for the students who come after you. I encourage you to participate in this process this fall between Nov. 20 and Dec. 5. Invitations are distributed to your Jaguar email account, or you may access Course Evaluations directly from the Tools menu when you log into Blackboard. Any questions concerning the process may be directed to the SRI administrator, Jane Mims, director of institutional research, at jane.mims@tamusa.tamus.edu.
