Student Evaluations- Instructor's Questionnaire
Spring 2002

In what ways could the course instructor improve how he teaches the course?

I think that Ron did an excellent job of teaching this class, especially the distance ed part of the class. He was very good about keeping the students at the other site involved and interested.

In my opinion, planning and preparation are key to teaching a course successfully. It seemed that the course was being developed on-the-fly, so to speak. I think it would have been easier to follow had the preparations been completed before the course began. (One example was the confusion caused by the webquests not being available in the same order as they were assigned.) When the instructor poses a question, students are hesitant to offer an answer in class because of the fear of embarrassment if their answer is incorrect. Frequently in this class, when the answer offered by a student was not precisely and completely the answer sought after by the instructor, the response was rather harsh. We come to class knowing that we have a lot to learn,(that's why we're here), but we don't want to be made to feel stupid in the process. Increased sensitivity to those students struggling with ESL issues and a better display of cultural awareness would also be appreciated.

Eliminate the number of webquests--there were too many. Don't send so many attachments to students e-mail, just send a link to the website and tell them what to download.

Satisfied with the course as is.

As mentioned above, the instructor is very knowledgeable/intelligent. However, with that intellect comes an arrogance that impedes the learning process. Less sarcasm would be a start.

I can't think of anything that would improve the class. Even though the webquests were long and sometimes time consuming, the knowledge gained far outweighs the negatives. The supplimental lists of material occasionally listed after the required readings were sometimes helpful, sometimes humorous. Perhaps more use of the different clips from ads and such, would help make important points or concepts more apparent (?) by giving a visual aid. (the funnier ones tend to be remembered the longest) This was my favorite class to come to.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure that there is any necessary changes that need to be made. I felt that the class, as a whole, was interesting, and I have learned more from this class then from any of my other required major classes.

Too much information is better than too little, but sometime too much information makes it possible for people to read every single item that you put on the web. So you have to find out whether the information you are putting is being put in proper use. Students taking three classes in generally may find it difficult to keep up with these information as well as their assignments. So it would be OK to give few assignments and make sure they read those and comprehend them.

He could write e-text books and/or market his web quest tools to other instructors. During Class, I was disappointed in the response to the instructor's questions. There were times when he asked a question and no one spoke up. There must be a way to draw students out.....but I have no idea what it might be. The students on the other side of the mountains were sometimes working on other stuff during class and at first I thought that maybe the television version wasn't as compelling. The evening that Ellensburg was on the DE end I decided that that was not the case, for me. A nerf bat? More Ad clips? Out of context questions?

Case analysis would be useful. Webquests should not be graded based on content. This is counterproductive to learning to think outside the box. They should be graded on completeness only.

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