A team of technical experts continues to work on determining why a new online teaching evaluation system failed April 20.
Almost 40 percent of the possible responses had been received by the time the system went down, during the university’s second semester of using the online teaching questionnaire.
After a successful first-semester launch of the system, leaders expressed deep disappointment and apologized to students who were unable to complete the evaluations and the faculty who were looking forward to the feedback.
John King, vice provost for academic information, told members of the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs that many people are working on the system to try to determine what went wrong.
“We don’t know enough to tell people what happened, but we’ve narrowed it down a lot in the last weekend,” King said at the April 27 SACUA meeting. One thing they have determined, he said, is that there was no evidence of hacking attempts involved with the malfunction.
The online evaluation process began April 15. Shortly after 9 p.m. on April 20, the system failed. Up to that time 52 percent of students had responded to one or more evaluations and just less than 40 percent of all possible responses had been entered. None of that data was lost and reports will be processed for the academic units.
A decision to abandon further collection came April 23, when it was determined that restarting could compromise other CTools functions. Some smaller schools and colleges since have conducted other forms of evaluation, but the larger colleges were unable to come up with an alternative plan so close to the end of the semester.
The university went paperless in the fall after a year of testing the system on a smaller scale. Those administering the program were extremely pleased with the outcome of the Fall 2008 launch, during which student participation was very similar to previous semesters in which students filled out paper teaching questionnaires during class time.
Ratings overall were comparable as well, allaying fears by some faculty that there would be a drop in satisfaction measures in a system that required students to log in on their own time to complete the questionnaires. Leaders credited students and faculty with the success of the launch.
A detailed Q & A on the system failure and university’s response is available at www.vpcomm.umich.edu/pa/key/teaching.html.
