The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Understanding academics ’ resistance towards ( online ) student evaluation

Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online's data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. Many higher educational institutions and academic staff are still sceptical about the validity and reliability of student evaluation questionnaires, in particular when these evaluations are completed online. One month after a university-wide implementation from paper to online evaluation across 629 modules, (perceived) resistance and ambivalence amongst academic staff were unpacked. A mixed-method study was conducted amongst 104 academics using survey methods and follow-up semi-structured interviews. Despite a successful " technical " transition (i.e., response rate of 60%, similar scores to previous evaluations), more than half of respondents reported a negative experience with this transition. The results indicate that the multidimensional nature of ambivalence towards change and the dual nature of student evaluations can influence the effectiveness of organisational transition processes. When students' opinions are misconstrued as calibrated ordinal variables, the consequences of divergent role expectations are mistakenly interpreted as a quantified measure of teaching incompetence, while the results of converging expectations are read as objective evidence of teaching excellence (Titus, 2008, p. 414). Introduction Given that student evaluations play a key role in retention, promotion and tenure decisions (Baldwin & Blattner, 2003; Kember & Ginns, 2012), many academic staff are concerned that a move to an online survey method may lead to lower response rates and consequently a less representative reflection of the teaching and learning experience. Even though several institutions have successfully implemented online student 2 evaluations educational institutions and academic staff remain sceptical about their value (Bennett Irrespective of efficiency savings for institutions in terms of processing online student evaluations, several advantages for academics have been proposed in the literature when switching to online evaluation. First of all, the turnaround of student evaluations is faster, thereby providing academics more rapid feedback to fine-tune al., 2011). Second, as it is easier for most students to write their reflections of the learning experiences on a keyboard than by hand, several studies have found that students provide more lengthy comments (Bennett & De Bellis, 2010) and more thoughtful comments online (Stowell et al., 2011). Finally, online evaluations may be less vulnerable to instructor variables on the day of evaluation (Dommeyer et al., 2004; Stowell et al., 2011). Most studies on online student evaluations …