In the fall of 2020, I opened my Canvas site for Historical Theology and began to grade the essays my students had submitted a day or two before. My eyes alighted on this unconventional introduction:

Before I begin, I would just like to express my appreciation for the reading this week. This is the content which I have been craving ever since I came to ACU. I feel like this is what has been missing in my theological education here, and I am very grateful for this week’s content.

A similar comment appeared a second time in my course evaluations for Historical Theology at the end of that semester. It felt great to have this kind of unsolicited feedback for a single assignment midway through and then to have it reaffirmed for the content of the whole course at the end of the semester. Another student in the same class articulated a similar sentiment: “This was the most valuable class that I have taken during my studies at ACU. It taught us the fundamental controversies and how Christian systematics grew…. Most of all, it shaped how I study Jesus, speak of Jesus, and pray.”

I can’t claim that all of my student evaluations are like this. On this page, I discuss the most significant things I’ve learned from student feedback and how I’ve responded. I’ve archived my course evaluations on a separate page for those who would like to see them. Generally speaking, when I compare my performance on evaluations to the average scores of others in my college, I think I am doing fairly well, though there’s always room for improvement.

For the last few years, I have not been satisfied with my student course evaluations, not because the evaluations are bad but because there are so few of them. It seems that my online students are less likely to do them, no matter how many reminders I send. When I teach face-to-face, I can set aside class time, but online students have to make time on their own, and in my experience, not very many of them do. This is unfortunate, as the feedback loop in asynchronous online classes is already harder to close than face-to-face. For the fall of 2020 through the spring of 2022, all of my classes were online, and I am not confident that the sample sizes of those evaluations are significant (though I am still taking the feedback that I did receive seriously). The students who do complete the evaluations are motivated: they either hated or loved their experience in my class. I’d really love to hear more from my students who fall somewhere in between.

One response that I have consistently had from students is that I do not grade in what students perceive to be a timely manner. Early on, I thought this was fair feedback; I was doing new course preps, and I was often behind on grading. But I have discovered that even when I am getting most assignments back to students within a week, they think I don’t return them in a timely manner. I dislike having a backlog of assignments to grade, so I try to finish the weekly grading within a week and the longer major assignments within two weeks. Some students will probably still complain about the turnaround, but at least I’ll feel good about it.

For my online classes, constructive criticism on student evalutions has helped me change the weekly discussion boards for the better. At first, I required students to post their weekly essays on the discussion board, read other students’ essays, and engage substantively with each other. I had noticed that students did their duty, but their discussion board posts were perfunctory. The deadline for the essay was in the middle of the week, with discussion lasting through Saturday. In the fall of 2019, a student in History of Christianity I observed that the mid-week deadline for the essay meant that they didn’t have much time to process the week’s assignment; the essay deadline was also on a night when they had ministry responsibilities at church. As a result, I changed my approach, and I have been happy about the results. I now ask students to compose a more open-ended discussion post mid-week, posing a question or taking a position on a topic related to the week’s course material. This way, they can use the discussion board to address something that does not fit the week’s essay prompt, make targeted applications to contemporary ministry settings, or give their ideas a “test run” before submitting the essay at the end of the week. This has worked really well, especially if I help them understand what a good discussion post looks like. We end up covering more ground than the topic of the week’s essay prompt. The quality of weekly essays has also improved. I noticed that my student evaluations for History of Christianity I in the fall of 2021 were better, and the response rate was higher. I’m not sure if there’s a correlation, but I do see evidence that these changes have approved the learning experience overall. Since then, I have made similar adjustments to the discussion board in other classes, with similarly good results.

In my online Greek class, I require students to check their translation homework independently, and we use the discussion board as a collective learning space to discuss questions, tricky Greek constructions, and revisions. Some students seem to dislike the exercise, and I’m not totally sold on it either. Still, I keep it in the class because it helps students see that they aren’t the only ones who struggle, it provides a community space for students who are otherwise learning Greek in isolation, and it often allows me to address the same issue once instead of having to write it multiple times in feedback to students’ homework. In years past, I have offered an optional weekly Zoom meeting to go over challenging aspects of the material. This fall I am experimenting with excusing the online students who join my residential Greek class virtually from the discussion board. I hope it incentivizes real-time participation, while also communicating what the discussion board is meant to facilitate: the sort of learning that happens when we’re studying the same thing together in one place, more or less at the same time.

Thanks to my student evaluations for History of Christianity I in the fall of 2021, I learned that some of my students don’t know how to find feedback on their assignments on Canvas. One student who was frustrated with his or her grade complained about not having feedback all semester. I knew this wasn’t the case because I’d left copious amounts of feedback for everyone all semester—I always used a rubric, responded to the student’s work in a general comment, and usually left annotations on the document interacting directly with the students’ work. I have realized that I cannot assume my students know where to look for or how to access my feedback on Canvas, even if they have been taking online classes for a while. This year, I have included a resource page on Canvas that describes the ways that I leave feedback with links to the relevant parts of the Canvas Student Guide. Hopefully, none of my students will be in the dark about their grades this year, and I won’t spend hours writing feedback that they don’t know is there.

While I occasionally have a student who doesn’t like a class that I’m teaching, most of the comments I receive on student evaluations are positive. They frequently state that I am a caring, approachable, and knowledgeable teacher. Students frequently remark that I am responsive to their needs, whether by answering email promptly or by arranging a meeting in real-time.

I have also started finding ways to solicit feedback midway through a class. For example, I have incorporated a new assignment in my Greek class this year, and I’m interested to know how it’s working for my students. I put a link to a Google form in the class Canvas site to invite students to leave constructive feedback. The form is anonymous and will not collect their names or email addresses. Since it seems that more and more students are not interested in doing the evaluations at the end of the semester, I plan to start incorporating this sort of “immediate” feedback into other courses too.

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