Online course starts Sunday

Students will receive an email through ACES Sunday with a link to complete student surveys for all current courses at the Alamo Colleges. The survey will end on Dec. 18.Vice President Jessica Howard said a new program, Class Climate, will be used to allow students to complete the survey through ACES email.Class Climate is a software that collects students evaluation and information,Thomas Cleary, vice chancellor for planning, performance and information systems, said Nov. 9.Gary O‘ Bar, district director of purchasing, said the cost of the Class Climate software was $47,000.

Howard said House Bill 2504 requires the district to update new programs such as Class Climate and ACES to meet uniform standards for publishing cost of attendance information, to conduct student evaluations of faculty, provide a syllabus and to make certain information available on the Internet within three clicks of the homepage.Students with mobile devices and access to the Internet should be able to fill out the survey,David Wood, director of institutional research planning and effectiveness, said.Faculty will be encouraged to have their students take the survey through SACALL emails,Wood said.Paper surveys to be tallied by scanners were used prior to the online survey.Wood said Class Climate contains the same questions as the paper survey.Students will get a prompt from every class to complete the survey,Howard said. She said she hopes that students will do the survey and not ignore the prompt.

She said reports will be generated for department chairs and instructors to show results of the student surveys.Howard said she was unsure how long it would take for the results to be tallied.
These are sophisticated reports that show their marks in relationship to others who teach the same course and to the institution as an average,Howard said.In fall 2010, Northwest Vista College ran a pilot for the Class Climate program.About 30 classes took the survey,Elizabeth Lopez, statistical research specialist at Northwest Vista, said Nov.10.They could use their computer desktop, iPad, iPod, iPhone, or laptop, to fill out the survey.

She said the pilot results were sent to administration for review.Another test was conducted in fall Flex 1 courses at this college.Wood said the results showed bugs in a data block cell that it has been fixed.Howard said eventually, students could use the results from the surveys to select a professor and course by clicking on a button on the school home page.She said the link would show the total score for the professor for all the classes they taught for the semester and would allow students to cross check them on eSyllabus.Results should be available for students to use to register for fall 2012.