By SUSAN JONES
The University is piloting new student opinion of teaching surveys this semester, and while students probably won’t notice much difference, it will give faculty additional tools for understanding trends and more.
ClassRanked will become Pitt’s official teaching survey administration system later this year. Faculty can sign up by March 2 to be part of the test group for the new system this spring. Then all faculty will be using it by the summer and fall.
The schools “make the decisions in terms of which classes get surveyed, which instructors get surveyed, what questions are used on the survey, things like that,” said John Radzilowicz, director of pedagogy, practice & assessment for the University Center for Teaching and Learning. “None of that changes. It’s really just the software and the end use, the interface that people are going to be dealing with.”
“People are going to do what they’ve always done, but they’re just going to experience it a little differently, because it’ll be a different interface,” said Lisa Votodian, survey assessment manager for the Office of Measurement and Evaluation of Teaching with the University Center for Teaching and Learning.
Erik Arroyo, director of academic support services, said this new platform is much more up to date than what Pitt has been using for the past 10 years. “There’s a lot of enhanced features and a much more intuitive experience for faculty, staff and students. And so the process will get better for folks who are completing these teaching surveys.”
One new feature is an interactive student QR code experience. “That will help boost completion rates, because it allows folks to do their surveys in real time right there in the class, which is one of our recommendations anyway, is to build in time to do surveys in the class,” Arroyo said. “That will help create higher participation with almost no effort from the instructor whatsoever.”
On the faculty side, there are several improvements:
Faculty will be able to display a response rate monitor that will track the student responses in real time.
There will be an AI synthesis of student comments that will help faculty look at those comments more holistically and pull together themes and areas that are working well and some areas that they might want to improve.
Faculty will be able to bookmark insightful student comments and save them on their dashboard.
They’ll be able to look at trends over time, once there’s more historical data in the system.
Deans also can access the reports, which they have had the ability to do since new provost guidance in 2021. That same guidance said that schools should come up with plans to include other types of evaluations, so that the student surveys were not the primary or only evaluation of teaching.
Radzilowicz said now with the faculty union and collective bargaining agreement in place, “the provost’s office has gone back to those plans and asked all of the schools to update those, and we are involved in helping the schools work through those updates, making sure that they’re doing things that are pedagogically sound and that make sense in terms of the evaluation of teaching.”
Only those involved with the spring pilot program will see any changes this semester. Once the system is fully implemented this fall, “the process is going to look a little different for them,” Votodian said. “They’re going to be logging on to a different interface. The instructions will be laid out for them.”
There will be information available on the Teaching Center website after the spring pilot. Participants in the pilot might have suggestions on instruction documents, user guides and more.
Several faculty members are already signed up for the pilot, but Votodian said they’ll take anyone who’s interested. The deadline to sign up is March 2. Find more information on the Teaching Center website.
Radzilowicz gave credit to Votodian for the work she did, along with a committee of nearly 30 people from the Teaching Center, the provost’s office, Pitt Digital, school leadership and faculty, in “looking at vendors, creating the original RFP, doing all the interviews and all of those things. This was very complicated, a lot of moving pieces, and we feel really good about where we landed in terms of the selection that was made.”
Arroyo said ClassRanked emerged as the clear favorite among that committee.
Votodian, Pitt Digital and the Teaching Center’s operations staff will be transferring over the data from the old system this summer. “Nothing is lost. Everything is going to continue to be secure. All the data from the old system will come into the new system,” Arroyo said.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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