By Anne Baker

Soon, life may become simpler for students searching for an easier way to share their thoughts about professors now that course evaluations will be online for undergraduate students, said Stephen Lavenberg, Student Government Association (SGA) vice president for academic affairs.

“A lot is changing. It’s not just putting the form we’ve always had on paper online,” he said. “It’s a new medium, it’s a new form altogether, so I think it’s going to change in a lot of ways.”

The evaluations, now called the Teacher Rating Course Evaluations, were approved earlier this year by Faculty Senate after a trial of the program in the fall semester, he said. The online aspect will begin this semester.

Course evaluations, which have traditionally been handed out on paper by a professor near the end of the semester, have a much longer turnaround time than online evaluations, Lavenberg said.

The online evaluations will have better questions designed to help professors improve, he said, and will be in a different format. Questions will now be organized by clusters of topics; for instance, how useful textbooks are, with a free response box after each cluster, he said.

The evaluations are essential to helping professors understand how they can improve their teaching skills, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Jim Stellar said.

“The evaluations are very informative,” he said. “They help the professors figure out how to teach better.”

Stellar said he spends a lot of time looking over the evaluations for the classes in his college. They play an important role in several areas, he said, including tenure.

But the evaluations are most important in creating a dialogue between students and professors about teaching and the university’s curriculum, he said.

“I look at them a lot, but the problem is students don’t,” he said. “Having them online is going to make them more accessible online and they’ll be available in a timely fashion.”

Lavenberg said one of the biggest concerns is the possibility of a lack of student participation.

“I don’t think students realize how important it is to fill out the forms,” he said.

Although the university has not put any motions in place to sanction students who do not fill out the forms, Lavenberg said they would propose such measures if student turnout is low.

“They didn’t propose any sanctions for this semester because they want to see how the turn out is,” he said. “The university doesn’t want to put sanctions on students, but if we don’t get enough student participation, then they will propose them.”

But online course evaluations are not new to all parts of Northeastern. The School of Professional and Continuing Studies (SPCS) has used them for its online courses for two years, said Kevin Currie, senior associate dean of the college.

Currie said SPCS made the switch because the old forms, which were submitted via mail, were often not returned.

“You don’t get as many results as you would like,” he said. “With the online evaluations, we seem to get a high level of return, that is students completing the evaluations.”

Stellar said he hoped the evaluations would provide even more information to professors and was happy to see the university modernizing.

“It’s nice to ser the university entering the 21st century and use a medium that students are familiar with,” he said.