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9th Annual Meeting 
of the 
International Association of Medical Science Educators 

July 14-19, 2005
 

Abstract Category: Assessment

Poster ID: A1

ONLINE STUDENT EVALUATION OF TEACHING AND TUTORING IN A HYBRID PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING MEDICAL CURRICULUM

John J. Leddy, Ph.D.*, Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada    K1H 8M5  

In 2001, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa became the first medical school in Canada to adopt a laptop-driven, Internet-based undergraduate medical curriculum.  This transformation provided unique opportunities to revitalize the curricular content, including the way in which student evaluations were collected.  One year later, the Faculty began to collect all student feedback in an online fashion using the WebCT software interface.  Evaluation data was collected using three different questionnaires rating block-specific objectives, individual lecturers and problem-based learning (PBL) tutors.

Although the use of online evaluation can offer many advantages (such as increased response time for students and reduced delivery costs), response rates in comparison to traditional, paper-based evaluations have proven problematic in some centers.  Initial student concerns identified in our implementation phase revolved around the length of the survey, the number of evaluations to be submitted, the issue of confidentiality and the perceived lack of impact of student feedback in general.  Faculty members, on the other hand, were pleased with the quality of the feedback received but very concerned with low response rates, especially in the PBL setting where the contact hours were significant. We sought to alleviate student concerns and ensure minimal participation rates by assigning 25% students, on a rotating basis, to “evaluation teams” that would be expected to shoulder a considerable evaluation load for a given six-week, system-based learning block. As of the end of the 2003-04 academic year, average online response rates were as follows: 70% for tutor evaluations; 70% for evaluation team members; 15 evaluations per lecture/lecturer; 700 evaluations received per block.  Detailed response rates for our English and French-speaking streams will be presented, highlighting the relative impact of faculty-driven interventions (carrots vs. sticks) for the period 2002-2005.  Our experience indicates that, under certain circumstances, online student evaluations can provide response rates and content that are comparable to, if not better than, in-class paper-based evaluations.

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