Guidance for Teaching a Blended, Online, or Hybrid Course: Step 10

Conduct an Early-Course Assessment and Adjust

In the fourth/fifth week of fall semester, the university will distribute a centralized early-semester feedback survey to help instructors make informed mid-course corrections, if necessary. 

Instructors are encouraged to review this input and make adjustments to their online course materials, activities, or approaches.  

Here are some resources for those looking for help interpreting results or making mid-course corrections, 

• OIRSA’s  “Guidance for interpretation of course evaluation results”
• CITL’s “Making Sense of Student Evaluations"
• Depending on the specific feedback you received, you may find it helpful to revisit specific course-development resources available on Lehigh’s Preparing to Teach in Fall 2021, Guidance for Teaching in Fall 2020. You can find a nice overview of recommended approaches on the ‘framework’ page, on the ‘checklist’ page, and on the ‘Recommended Pedagogy for Fall 2020’ page.
• If the feedback you received suggested changes to technology use, the LTS searchable Knowledge Base is likely your best source to find quick answers to instructional technology questions.  The “Teaching and Learning section" may be especially helpful to you at this time.
• Some of your best support and can come from colleagues or mentors within your department who are also working to adapt to this semester’s unique teaching environment;
• If you ever need help with a teaching or technology topic,and would like to consult with LTS/CITL staff on pedagogy, assignment design, digital media production, instructional technology, student projects, etc.  submit a LTS/CITL Help request, which will connect you to thee right in-house expert.
• Recordings of the "Preparing for Fall 2020”  Faculty Workshops
• Recordings of the  Spring 2020 Faculty Workshops on Online Teaching

From the Provost's Office 9/16/2020 Email: "This information is for you as the instructor, and since department chairs are responsible for oversight of courses, it will also be shared with your department chair. We want to stress that we know that we are taking an early snapshot, and this is for course development, not course evaluation. You can see the assessment tool here. [...] The Office of Institutional Research and Strategic Analytics, which will be conducting the assessment, will not share course-level information with the provost’s office, but share information that has been aggregated across courses. None of the information gathered will be used in performance reviews or in promotion, tenure, or reappointment cases. OIRSA will be using the same tool – EvaluationKit – to conduct this assessment as is used for end-of-term course evaluations, but the results will be kept separate and will not be added to Lyterati or mingled in any way with course evaluation data.

Instructors may wish to conduct their own surveys to get more specific feedback from students (sample questions; sample Google form survey.).