Thanks to Rick Reis’s Tomorrow’s Professor newsletter I bumped into an instrument that I think can be a very important addition to or replacement for teaching evaluations and/or student course evaluations. This Teaching Practices Inventory was developed by the Noble Prize winning Physicist Carl Wieman who was hired at the University of British Columbia to change his scientific research focus from Science to the Teaching of Science. UBC established an “initiative” for him at http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/
He has produced an instrument that allows Faculty to assess their course teaching design through a focus on activities- what the students actually do and resources they have access to. It provides a quantifiable score, only takes 10 minutes, is available for use free and online.