Coversity: Moving towards a co-creating university

Erasmus University Rotterdam strives to collaborate with students to realize better education. To do so, students have many options of providing feedback, for example just after following a course. Unfortunately, many students do not use the possibility of providing such feedback, or provide low quality feedback. A major reason that (detailed) observations are not made is that students are unsure if their remarks are actually used for changing and improving courses. Prior research points to the role of transparency of how feedback promotes educational improvements and innovations. Such transparency was expected to increase students’ motivation to provide feedback during course evaluations. Remarkably, although transparency was often advised, empirical research proving its effectiveness was lacking.

The main purpose of this CLI project was to facilitate student participation in course evaluations by increasing the transparency of the usefulness student feedback. Our results showed that such transparency did not increase student engagement nor participation in course evaluations. Instead, a standardized animation that informed students of the course evaluation cycle, process and their role herein, did impact students’ faith in course evaluations, and even their participation. However, we did not see they provided different or better feedback.

The findings of our project gave important new insights in how student participation in course evaluations can be increased. At the same time, many follow up questions remain unanswered. We therefore continue the collaboration between ESSB and RSM with a PhD project to further examine how the course evaluation process at Erasmus University can be improved.