How do you evaluate your online courses?

How do you evaluate your online courses? Are you using those evaluations to make improvements? For optimal learning and utilization of new knowledge, you’ll want to support your learners in staying behaviorally and emotionally engaged. These measures can also help you hone in on areas to improve your course. Let’s take a closer look.

Behavioral engagement

Are learners moving through the course as you intend? Are they getting tripped up on any assessments? Are they completing activities thoughtfully? While the “thoughtfulness” of a discussion board or assignment engagement is something you’ll need to determine qualitatively as you’re teaching a course, Canvas’s “new analytics” can give you some helpful reports to understand the learner engagement through the course more collectively. You’ll quickly see how many times items are viewed. If you offer quizzes as a formative assessment, allowing people to take them as many times as needed to “pass” and continue, you’ll have at-a-glance data to see which quizzes presented the most trouble. 

Emotional engagement

Are learners feeling focused, anxious, bored, confused, frustrated, or something else? While you might be tempted to wait until the end of a course to ask questions about learner satisfaction, that information will be much less valuable to you than gathering it throughout the course. If you ask a quick question like, “Over the last few minutes, how have you been feeling?” and provide a set of possible responses a few times throughout the course, you might be able to narrow in on specific areas of the course where people disengage, gather some information about why, and make plans to improve it!

Learning outcomes

Are you using pre and post tests to measure learning gains? Have you identified any areas that are particularly complex or where the learning is simply not being transferred as anticipated? A lot of this can be evaluated with Canvas quizzes or more qualitatively with discussion forums. Qualtrics, with links embedded in your Canvas course, can also help you evaluate learning with data that’s more easy to work with outside of Canvas. Surveying your audience a week, month, or more after the course can also help you identify what was retained and what was put into action. 

How does this align with your experience?

Are you already using all three of these components to evaluate your courses? Is there one you prefer? Or one you’re going to try utilizing for the first time? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below, or with an email directly (exttech@umn.edu) if you’d like help to make it happen.