Personalizing Questions for Online Student Evaluations of Teaching

UMaine Alert

Posted: April 19, 2024 - 1:32 PM

At approximately 9:24 a.m. on Friday, April 19, a University of Maine graduate student was struck by a university vehicle on Long Road at the University of Maine campus in Orono. The student reports that they are at a local hospital with minor injuries.

Emergency services, including the Orono Fire Department, University Volunteer Ambulance Corps, University of Maine Police Department, Orono Police Department and Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office responded to the scene.

The university vehicle involved in the incident was a Chevrolet Express van. It was being operated by a university employee.

Counseling services and support are available for students, faculty or staff who may have been affected. The Counseling Center can be reached at 207-581-1392 and the Dean of Students Office can be reached at 207-581-1406.

The scene has been cleared and Long Road is now accessible. An investigation is being conducted by the University of Maine Police Department with assistance from the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office Crash Reconstruction Unit. Any witnesses to the incident are encouraged to contact Lt. Noel Santiago at noel.santiago@maine.edu.

April 7, 2020 April Newsletter

It may be hard to believe but the time for student evaluations of teaching (SET) is fast approaching and with that comes the time for faculty to add personalized questions to their online questionnaire in Blue. Question personalization (QP) is a straightforward task and your opportunity to add up to 10 questions to the questionnaire. Questions added during QP only appear on the instructors’ own report summaries and are for informational purposes only. Approximately four weeks before the end of classes, faculty will receive an email that includes instructions and a link to Blue to add questions. Two weeks are given to complete this task. We recommend having your questions prepared before you follow the QP link to add them in Blue. The UMaine Orono Standard 19 questions are available on the OIRA website. Please do not duplicate these questions as students will have already answered them earlier in the questionnaire.

Faculty are able to add up to seven scaled (Likert) questions and three open-ended comment style questions for each course that they teach. To aid in this process, particularly if the same questions are being added for each course a faculty member is teaching, we recommend writing them in a Word document and then copying/pasting them into the space available for each course. CITL provides some recommendations and additional resources for using personalized questions to shift the focus from instructor performance to the learners’ experience. These include questions such as:

How would the student rate their own ability/confidence?
What will the student remember in 5 years?
How did the learning activities support learning?

As always, we are here to help, so please reach out to Lisa Henderson (lisa.henderson@maine.edu ) or Ryan Weatherbee (ryan.a.weatherbee@maine.edu) if you have any additional questions about QP or other aspects of online SET.

UMaine Alert

Office of Institutional Research and Assessment

Personalizing Questions for Online Student Evaluations of Teaching

First Destination

IR Data Fellows

Website Updates

Fall/Spring First-Year Student Success Efforts