Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Paper-Based vs. Computer-Based

Today students completed final course evaluations with the use of WebCT, a university supported software program with a gatekeeping system. This is the technology I used in my classes prior to discovering blogs. While it offers some features that blogs don't, e.g. ease of attaching documents, it limits the audience to whoever has access.
In the past, I primarily used paper-based evaluations and found these to be adequate. However, these took a lot of class time, and students begrudgingly carried the evaluations to the office because of the inconvenience. Consequetly, during our reserved lab time today, students completed course evaluations on WebCT. This was a much more efficient way to do the evaluations. I don't think I'll go back to paper-based. However, I'm curious about evaluation content differences between paper and computer-based evaluations.