Online evaluations allow students to provide feedback on their learning experiences at ACU while ensuring that their comments remain confidential. Students have the opportunity to "save and continue" and have more time to provide detailed feedback. This allows students to further explain the best aspects of the unit or why improvement is needed. The Student Evaluation of Learning and Teaching (SELT) surveys remain open until just before the final results/grades for the units are published.
Online evaluations also support ACU's environmentally friendly green initiative, especially since all units with at least 10 enrolled students (and not just about half the number of units) in ACU are evaluated.
Teaching staff members and relevant officers in Schools and Faculties now receive an electronic aggregated report with quantitative information and all student comments.
Therefore, the current online evaluation system addresses (or alleviates) the following issues related to the previous paper-based surveys:
- A frequent complaint from students when paper-based surveys were conducted in class was that they did not have enough time to complete the rating-type questions or write meaningful comments.
- Confidentiality was a serious concern for many students. Some students complained that staff had recognised their handwriting and contacted them directly regarding the feedback. There were also students who did not want to write anything, for fear of being penalised in some way.
- Some lecturers and many students complained about 'wasting' class time close to the examination period, in order to allow students to complete their paper questionnaires.
- Generally, only one some staff member teaching in a unit had access to qualitative feedback (written comments) from students.