Evaluations for online courses can be rough. Students often enter the course with unrealistic expectations based on their experience in face to face courses, and gender, race, and heteronormative bias has been well documented in student evaluations for all courses. This is particularly egregious online where studies have shown that randomly assigning a female name to an instructor netted lower scores for the same materials. What can instructors do to get better feedback from their own students?

The first thing you can do is make sure that students understand the differences between an online class and a face to face class. You can include language in the syllabus about the difference and add questions about it into a syllabus quiz at the start of the semester. This should give students better insight into your course and might help them provide better feedback.

The next thing you can do is take control of the evaluation process. You can make your own evaluations and have students fill them out as often as you want. You’ll never eliminate bias, but by making the evaluations more focused, you can target feedback better and encourage more focused thought from your students.

One particular recommendation I can make is to make “One Point Better” evaluations at the end of your modules. These are simple, two-question evaluations. The first question asks you students to rank the module from one to ten. The next question asks your students how you can make the module one point better. You can make these evaluations even more focused by asking students about different parts of the module like the quiz or the discussion.

In order to make this evaluations, you can use surveys. Go to the Quizzes page and add a new quiz. Below the text box, there is a dropdown menu where you can make the quiz into an ungraded survey. Next, check the box below to make the survey anonymous. Once you make the survey, add the questions and save it. In order to ensure that students complete the survey, add the survey to a module, then edit the module and add the survey as a requirement. Finally, edit the next module (and those after) and add this module with the survey as a prerequisite. This will force the students to take the survey before progressing through the course.

Most of the online courses we offer in the History Department are surveys covering a broad span of history. Many of us therefore feel trapped by the amount of material we have to cover to give a full impression of the scope of the class. Class sessions and modules become defined by broad and breathless narrative combined with a smattering of primary sources from a reader with bare any relation to each other. This is a comfortable way to teach but it can put a lot of onus on the teacher (how do you become so informed on such disparate topics) while presenting students with a burdensome amount of information.

One way to break this reliance on narrative is to give your students case studies to work through in each unit instead of giving them more material from the narrative they can get from a textbook or online videos. You can present materials connected to a theme like disease or women related to the period your students are reading about from. Doing this in an online course also offers you the opportunity to use materials from different media in the study. In the olden days our department used a series of these in the form of Retrieving the American Past and Experiencing the European Past. An example I use in my classes looks like this:

How connected was the Roman Empire?

1. A short video describing the topic and its relation to the readings for the week/module.
2. A description of Monte Testaccio in Rome (a hill made of discarded pottery) from archeology.org.
3. A link to ORBIS, a “Google Maps” for imperial Rome.
4. Descriptions of travel in the Roman empire: Bordeaux Itinerary and a couple of other.
5. A discussion page for students to answer a series of questions.

Case studies allow teachers to bring in a series of sources and media related to one main theme or issue. This allows you to run a focused discussion where even students who do not complete all the readings can participate effectively. It also allows you to focus more on the skills history can offer to students allowing them to think critically about sources in one topic instead of focusing on narratives.