Bloomington Faculty council discusses online course evaluations, tenure review

The Bloomington Faculty Council convened Tuesday to discuss student course evaluations, as well as promotion and tenure review.

Promotion and Tenure Review
The discussion continued about the way in which faculty are considered for promotion or tenure.

Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs Tom Gieryn presented a revised draft of the guidelines for the review process.

Faculty members discussed the way in which student course evaluations are used during review.

The new draft of the guidelines, Gieryn said, would permit student course evaluations to be referred to as a means of identifying teaching problems and assessing the efforts made by the instructor to correct those problems.

While the clarification incited some debate about the use of student evaluations in review, the discussion will continue in future meetings.


Online student course evaluations
The process for moving the current pen-and-paper student evaluations to online evaluations has been an ongoing project for the past two years. Last spring, it was presented to the BFC, and several concerns were raised.

Professor Padraic Kenney, chair of the BFC’s Educational Policies Committee, presented the latest draft of the online course questionnaires policy.

Kenney said the biggest change to the policy concerns the disclosure of the results of course evaluations.

Some universities, such as Northwestern University, give students complete access to the results of course questionnaires.

While the proposed policy would allow only select information to be made available to students, Kenney said providing students access to evaluation results is a way of thanking students for their feedback.

English professor John Schilb contested the proposal and said he believed it would only create a “shopping guide” for courses, and that most of the faculty would hate making questionnaire answers available to students.

“Opening it up to students, I just think it could have a differential impact on professors ... and could potentially result in the narrowing of curriculum,” said Cassandra Guarino, an associate professor of education.

Some faculty members disagreed that the evaluations should be completed online, and members had raised concerns at a previous meeting about students and others misunderstanding or misusing the data.

Proponents of making information available to students said releasing the data would provide students an alternative to resources such as the Rate My Professors website, which education professor David Estell said tends to house overwhelmingly negative opinions of instructors, although he said he wasn’t entirely in support of the notion.

The BFC did not vote on the issue.


Policy on financial conflicts of interest in research
Optometry professor Steve Burns spoke about the National Institutes of Health’s recently strengthened rules concerning research funding conflicts of interests.

The new policies will, among other things, decrease the threshold recipients of grants must disclose from $10,000 to $5,000. It will also require that those receiving funds for travel from parties other than the University or the government must also disclose
that information.

The new policy affects many faculty members who already disclose information about research funding, Burns said. It will simply increase the amount of information demanded, he said.

The BFC will reconvene at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 17.

— Kirsten Clark