Adapting to a changing environment: Improving the performance of evaluation services

Edward Palmer , The University of Adelaide, South Australia

The introduction of the Learning and Teaching Performance Fund has generated great interest in evaluating teaching and learning at all levels in the Higher Education system. At the University of Adelaide , this has manifested itself by staff increasing the amount of surveys measuring the student experience, with ongoing ramifications for the workload of evaluation staff. Data from 2004 to 2006 was examined, looking for changes in the evaluation processes of staff. Since semester 1 2004, there has been an increase of 47% in the number of student experience surveys carried out by staff. The initial outcome of this increase was the increase in turnaround time for reporting from 11 days to 29 days despite the number of surveys processed per day increasing from 48 to 70. In order to respond to this challenging increase in workload, new survey forms were designed, new equipment was purchased and new processes were introduced. The outcome as measured in semester 1, 2006 was a turnaround time reduced to 6 days and an increase in the number of surveys processed per day to 200. Staff had the choice of standard teacher and course surveys, extended versions of these where they were able to add up to 5 additional questions and specially designed surveys. The latter require substantial effort from all parties concerned, but often provided information unlikely to be gleaned from standard survey instruments. The increase in survey usage was equally distributed across most survey types, but there was a significant drop in the number of extended teacher surveys carried out. There was no difference observed in the number of student responses per survey.