As you design and deliver your course, you will be using new techniques and facilitating learning activities that may differ from those students are used to. These two factors may temporarily cause you to have lower end-of-semester course evaluations. A part of blended course design should include a plan to collect data on the positive outcomes facilitated through your new design that can be used alongside the traditional course evaluation process.

Developing an Evaluation Plan

As you design and deliver your course, you and your students may be engaged in new and unfamiliar techniques and approaches. These changes may temporarily affect your end‑of‑semester course evaluations. Your course design should include a plan to collect data on the positive outcomes facilitated through your new design to supplement your course evaluation. Consider the following suggestions as you develop your evaluation plan.

• Talk with your program coordinator about your plans to redesign your course. Ask what evidence they would want to see regarding the performance of your course.
• If you are pre‑tenure, engage in conversations with your chair and tenure committee about what evidence they would want to see in addition to formal end‑of‑semester evaluation results.
• Review your course learning outcomes, module learning objectives, identified competencies, and student assessments. Consider the kinds of data you can collect to show process or improvement in achieving these designated levels.
• Solicit student feedback and review performance/behavioral data to inform course improvement.
• Identify other course goals on which you want to gather data (i.e., a decrease in D/F/W rates, an increase in student engagement, or an improvement in student performance on specific learning outcomes).

What Makes a Good Evaluation Plan

The following are some principles of evaluation that can be helpful as you plan to evaluate your course. Good evaluation plans:

• Are not an afterthought;
• Have a defined and meaningful purpose;
• Include asking the right people for feedback;
• Are iterative and support your measurements of success;
• Include multiple types and sources of feedback;
• Are flexible and enable responsiveness;
• Take advantage of existing evaluation tools; and
• Include a process for acting on feedback.

Making Sense of Evaluation Results

Refer to your goals/strategy in your evaluation plan. Make sure the data you will collect contributes to or informs your evaluation goals. The data collected may only answer some of the questions you are trying to answer. Ask yourself whether this information is enough to make informed decisions or whether you need to find additional data. The process of sense-making of data should include:

• Accessing the data you collect
• Reviewing the data
• Developing some initial interpretations, such as patterns or trends from the data
• Synthesizing other data sources to answer your evaluation questions.

The campus has developed guiding principles — beneficence, transparency, privacy and confidentiality, and minimizing adverse impacts — on using data to improve educational outcomes.

Guiding Principles for Using Learning Analytics — https://kb.wisc.edu/learning-analytics/104805

Evaluation Plan Example

Evaluation Plan Worksheet

• Download the Step 8: Evaluation Plan Activity Worksheet.