One of my responsibilities in the Faculty Center is the administration and utilization of the campus course evaluations, typically not a subject that one would get excited about…in fact, not something that I get particularly excited about.  BUT, what does excite me about course evaluations is finding ways to bring the teaching and learning process full circle.  From the moment the student steps into the classroom on the very first day of the semester to that same student exiting the room after completing the final exam, an ages-old process has been completed: what we think of as teaching and learning.

What often occurs inside the traditional campus classroom involves:

• An instructor lecturing from a PowerPoint;
• An instructor talking and writing on the chalk/white board, Sympodium, etc.;
• An instructor reading from his/her notes;
• Students sitting passively in the audience soaking up said instructor’s wisdom (and hoping to retain enough to pass the next exam);

or, it could look like this:

• Instructor walking around the room lecturing and involving students in the discussion;
• Instructor using technology to engage students actively in the learning process;
• Students working in pairs or small groups;
• Students teaching students with the instructor at the back of the room, facilitating.

So that’s what it LOOKS like in the traditional classroom, the teaching part.  But what about the learning?  What about the student experience while in that classroom?  There is an entire discipline devoted to learning, teaching and how students experience learning, and I’ll devote this space to discussing that discipline.  My idea is to highlight how we can better identify what students have learned and how they have learned it through our use of course evaluations, how we can bring this process full circle for students and faculty.