Due Date: By end of Reading Week, on BBlearn.
Points: 10 pts, in "participation" portion of grading schema
Rules: Individual Effort!!

The assignment:

After a semester of working hard on challenging assignments, this is an easy one! Nonetheless, it counts nicely towards your grade, making up about half of the "participation" points section of the syllabus grading schema.

Course evaluations are a great way for you to help me improve the course, and I do read them quite carefully. The rating questions on the eval are a bit mundane and non-specific (just good stats), but the written comments are the really useful part, where you can comment on what your felt worked and didn't work in the course.

Some pointers about student evaluations in general:

• Comments like "It was too hard" or "Cover less material" are not very useful. Courses have particular learning outcomes that have to be met, material that has to be covered -- not to mention that you're paying a lot of money to get an education and deserve your money's worth!
• Much more useful are comments on *how* the material was delivered: was the pacing/workload evenly distributed? More time/emphasis on this topic, less on that one? Were some projects/assignments more useful than others?
• Also useful are specific comments on delivery. Example: years ago, there was a pattern of comments that I tended to stand in one place while lecturing, blocking the view of the whiteboard for one half of the class. Interesting. So now I try to move around between writing things.
• I'm always trying new things, in courses: new assignments/projects, tweaks in ordering of projects, having teams vs. individual work, having in-class mini-breaks to allow students to work on a problem together before we talk about it in class, etc. If you particularly liked or disliked some aspect, please comment!
• Were office hours sufficient...or even useful to you (i.e., did you use them?). Were any extra help sessions we did, study guides, etc. helpful or not. Can you think of any other (reasonable!) resource that could have been made available that would support your personal learning efforts?
• Did you feel prepared for the course coming in? We can't dumb down this course's content...but maybe we could feedback to previous courses (or even install new pre-reqs) to improve learning of needed background? Conversely, maybe you did feel really well-prepared due to a particular previous course (official pre-req or not); let us know!

In general, the more thoughtful and specific you are, the better you are helping to make the course better...and helping me fine-tune my teaching style and philosophy. Which is why I'm "paying" you a few points for your opinion! Teaching is a two-way street...

So please, take a few thoughtful minutes to do your student eval. It's easy, it's very helpful...and it's worth a few points!

To Turn in: (Due by Friday of Reading Week!)

The student eval system will give you some screen at the end of your eval to confirm that you've done the eval. They are continually changing exactly what this screen looks like in the NAU system, but I've pasted in a sample below to help you recognize it. Basically, anything that shows your name, the class the eval was for, and the date. Screenshot or otherwise capture this confirmation, and submit it on BBlearn as a PDF.

Notes:

• Please please DO NOT click the "send proof" link showing in the eval page. This literally just sends the prof an email...and fielding a gazillion emails is just not workable for us!
• The content of the evals are completely anonymous; professors see all the summaries, but there are never any names...just "student 1", "student 2", etc. You will get your full points simply for taking the time to fill out and submit the eval --- it is not "graded" in any sense.
• The BBlearn assignment is marked "due" at the end of reading week. This is the official due date for this assignment...and also the Course Eval system closes at that time, so you'll want to get it done before then. If for some reason you forget to submit the actual pdf late, it's no big deal, so long as you've uploaded it by the end of finals weeks. But why delay and risk forgetting?

Sample of the page to snapshot, turn into pdf, and upload. Details may vary as NAU modifies the system; anything showing your name, course name, and date eval taken is fine.