Department Chair FAQ
What, if anything, do I need to do in order for my department/program to start using IDEA?
- Encourage your faculty to visit idea.unm.edu to become familiar with the IDEA system.
- Consider the value of establishing common learning objectives for all courses taught by multiple instructors in order to comparatively track student progress on these objectives, and to help develop consistency in the learning expectations from these courses. These consistently collected data can be used as indirect measures of outcomes assessment in your courses.
- Examine the long and short response forms and engage faculty to consider which form is best for which courses. You are encouraged to consider the value of the diagnostic feedback to improve teaching that is provided by the long form. However, if there are many additional questions that you wish to ask that are particularly pertinent to your courses then instructors are encouraged to select the short form to avoid survey fatigue.
How do I use IDEA to evaluate my faculty members?
- That is up to you and the policies set by your department, school or college. The Office of Support for Effective Teaching (OSET) can provide guidance on how to use IDEA as part of a portfolio for assessing teaching effectiveness.
- Unlike ICES, you will not be receiving a summary printout of IDEA results for each course. Instead, you will receive a Group Summary Report of aggregate data. This means that you will need to establish a policy within your department for instructors to provide the data pertinent to performance appraisal (which may not be all of the IDEA responses).
- You are encouraged to read this report from IDEA: Using IDEA Results for Administrative Decision Making.
I heard that instructors can “game” the IDEA system by choosing only those objectives that they do well on (True or False)?
True, to a point. Student progress on learning objective is, however, only one factor in an instructor’s overall rating. As a dept. chair you can ask your faculty members to justify their course objectives and track those objectives over time.
What do dept. admins have to do to administer IDEA?
- The process is substantially the same as the one departmental admins followed for ICES.
- Encourage your departmental admins to read the FAQ for Departmental Admins.