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Anne Wallace, OLLI at American University, asks OLLI:
1. What kind of evaluation or feedback does your OLLI ask for after a class is finished? Do you use a form?
2. How does your OLLI inform a study group leader they are done teaching? Do you offer up free classes/”gold watch?”
You may respond directly to Anne Wallace @awallace@american.edu.
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University of Utah
Hi Anne. I’ll post here so others can see and also send you an email directly so you don’t have to check the blog.
Our case may be a bit different than yours as we have paid faculty rather than study group leaders. Teaching at OLLI is a small part of their life. They either teach elsewhere or have other full time engagements. Some are retired faculty.
Each student fills out a written course and instructor evaluation at the end of the class. This consists of about 5 questions for each category. Students score on a Likert scale. There is also space for write in comments and a couple of open ended questions. I can send you the form if you want. E-mail me at chouse@aoce.uatah.edu. Many students are “easy” graders so we call these our smile surveys.
We have a classroom assistant (CA) for every class. The CA’s are instructed to call the office if there are any problems with the class. They are our ear to the ground. We are moving towards having the curriculum committee (CC) contact the CA mid-term to get a feel for how the class is going. The earlier we know about a problem the more likely we are to be able to rectify it.
If something is amiss we have the responsible CC member contact the instructor to see what can be done. Some instructors are receptive, some not so much. We have only had one case where we’ve had to “fire” and instructor who had a sense of entitlement regarding his work with OLLI.
Our curriculum committee reviews all course proposals and selects the curriculum each term. If an instructor is “done” teaching they are simply not invited back. We contact everyone who submitted a proposal that was not selected to let them know. We don’t go too deep into the reasons unless pressed. Other who have not been invited back have seen their enrollment drop and the reason they are not invited back is quite obvious.
We offer our faculty a modest monetary honorarium (which is taxable income) or gift certificates that can be redeemed for membership or courses and are transferable. Some faculty donate their services and consider it either community service, a vehicle for spreading the word about their work, or an amazing opportunity to work with engaged and engaging students.
California State University Channel Islands
1. Yes, we have a standard form, modeled after one we developed and systematically tested at my former university department. It has been modified for our population. I’ll send it.
2. We have paid professionals in formal courses, not study group leaders. Thus the process of divestment is easier - we are not dealing with members but with contracted “outsiders”. If their evaluations were not acceptable, we don’t invite them back - they are pointedly left off my announcement of course proposal deadlines. Moreover, all instructors are sent their evaluations, which are numerical scores on 10 items but also include written remarks by students. I add my own summary. Unacceptable evaluaitons will usually keep intructors from submitting another proposal. If they do submit,I share with them my misgivings over their performance. Gently.
University of Richmond
We use an evaluation form developed by our curriculum committee; it’s posted on our website at www.scs.richmond.edu/osher. The completed evaluations are reviewed by the OLLI staff and the curriculum committee. All of our OLLI leaders are volunteers regardless of their background. We have adopted the philosophy that leading an OLLI course is how many of our OLLI members find fulfillment and we try to work with any leaders who are having difficulty to improve their leadership skills rather than let them go.
Brandeis University
Anne, Like Cathy, I will also send to your email.
1. What kind of evaluation or feedback does your OLLI ask for after a class is finished? Do you use a form?
Yes. We use a form which I will attach to the email. Hear this: The committee responsible for designing and administering and reviewing the form wants to change it EVERY year as new members come on the committee. It is ‘one of those things’ about being member-driven (this can easily happen with professionals as well) that people want to tweak things and that their way is the better way. I finally asked the Chair of our Resource Committee (complement to Curr Comm) to NOT change the form for a little while because even though we’ve been doing business for 9 years - we have not data we can compare because the form changes every year.
If it was up to me, I would use the simplest of forms including:
How would you rate this class: E, VG, G, F, P
and three questions:
** What did you like/was great about this class?
** What didn’t work/should be improved and how related to this class?
** Anything else you’d like us to know to improve our curriculum?
Finally - and I’ve spoken with many OLLI directors and other LLI directors about this - one of the biggest issues related to this is - members don’t want to criticize peer leaders and either don’t complete evals or aren’t honest about what they don’t like. They don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
2. How does your OLLI inform a study group leader they are done teaching?
I can’t actually think of an example of what you are asking about, e.g., “retiring” a course leader. We have made decisions that a certain leader won’t lead again because of “lack of” quality AND not being open to feedback about how to improve. In these cases, it plays out in a couple of ways: 1) our Curr Comm, when a person submits a proposal, will talk with that person about what worked and didn’t last time. If it is clear there is not going to be improvement - the CC let’s them know, it’s no longer a good fit. This is hard. We actually have lost a couple of members as a result AND a good number have accepted it and continued as active members of the program, e.g., serving on committees.
Do you offer up free classes/”gold watch?” No. The benefits to our course leaders are when they are leading - 1) getting the courses they want (no lottery for oversubscribed courses) and 2) reduced fee when they are leading. And many thanks.
This is a great subject for discussion.