Curtin Student Guild are continuing to improve Curtin’s course feedback system ‘eVALUate’ by working towards replacing it with a different service by semester two this year.
Developed in 2005, eVALUate is Curtin’s virtual feedback system, allowing students to provide feedback on their units and tutors via a survey emailed to each student at the end of each semester.
Guild President Dylan Botica says the Guild has spent the last two years pushing the university to revise eVALUate by replacing it with an ‘improved digital system.’
“eVALUate’s system was developed by Curtin’s IT team some time ago and hasn’t been able to be updates for quite a while. We also saw that less and less students are participating in eVALUate which meant that problem Units weren’t being identified and remedied,” Botica says.
“We ran on an election priority of pushing the university to overhaul eVALUate and replace it with something with better questions and more actionable feedback.”
The Guild discovered students have multiple concerns regarding eVALUate, including the belief that eVALUate is ineffective in improving unit and staff teaching quality.
“Students don’t see who is receiving the incentives for participating [in the eVALUate survey] … students also want to be able to provide feedback earlier to improve their experience while actually undertaking units,” Botica says.
Pharmacology student Alec Hasegawa says the inconvenience of providing feedback for all four units has meant he has never used eVALUate before.
“I’ve been studying at Curtin for three years now … and I’ve never used eVALUate, I just delete the email. It’s too much of a hassle,” Hasegawa says.
“The only time I would use eVALUate would be if a unit is really, really bad, then I might … but even if I enjoy a unit heaps I still wouldn’t use it … I just can’t be bothered.”
With such a small number of students engaging in eVALUate, Curtin staff have found it challenging to rely on eVALUate as a reliable marker of performance.
“University staff including National Tertiary Education Union members have had to deal with eVALUate used to performance manage them which is increasingly problematic when relying on quite a small percentage of students actually participating,” Botica says.
“Students and staff didn’t feel like the questions were the best they could be to be able to meaningfully improve units.”
After conducting a number of interviews, surveys and focus groups, the Guild has worked to create a new online feedback system to be rolled out in semester two.
The new system will implement a ‘pulse-check requirement’ in which staff must check in with students throughout the semester to yield suggestions to improve their learning experiences.
“The current planned release date is very tight but we have been working hard towards a semester two rollout,” Botica says.
“We are currently finalising the company to develop or implement the software, but once this is complete the team will be working quickly to implement all this hard work for next semester.”
