A system for capturing students' responses to teaching evaluation questionnaires on-line has been developed in HKUST. The system is Web-based and COSSET is its name, which stands for "Centralised On-line System for Student Evaluation of Teaching". The system has been thorougly trialed and evaluated in terms of system performance, response rates,students' acceptance and comparability with paper-based data. The trial suggested that the implementation of an Web-based system for end of semester evaluations in local HEIs should be a feasible alternative to current paper-based system. In December, 1998 the system was successfully used in a large scale end-of-semester course evaluation exercise, involving 234 sections and over 12,000 evaluations. An overall response rate of 75% was recorded. Local HEIs are welcome to contact us for assistance to set up their Web-based system for students evaluation of teaching. Overseas higher education institutes are also welcome to contact us for information.
Development of COSSET was funded by UGC. It is the product of a project entitled "Implementation of a On-line System for Teaching Evaluation", which is part of a larger project entiled "ESEP - Implementation", a sequel to the project "ESEP - Evaluation of Student Expereince Project". Development of COSSET is a continuation of a similar attempt by Mavis Kelly ( HKUST ) and Jonathon Marsh (HKU), who in a project entitled "Going on-line for student evaluation of teaching" developed and trialled an on-line system for end-of-semester student evaluation of teaching. Their effort successfully dealt with a number of technical and administrative issues in using an on-line system for student evaluation of teaching. Results of their work have been reported in a conference entitled "ET2000" in Singapore and a HERDSA conference, July 8 -11 (1997) entitled "Towards a System for On-line Student Evaluation". A fuller system description of the Phase one project and the trial results will be forthcoming in an ESEP publication.
Besides COSSET, the project team has also developed and implemented another Web-based system ( OSTEI ) which allows instructors to create their own questionnaires, administer them through the Web and view the resutls on the Web. Whereas COSSET is mainly for summative evaluation of teaching, OSTEI is for formative evaluation of teaching. For information about OSTEI can be found in the OSTEI website (http://home.ust.hk/~eteval/ostei).
With current emphasis on teaching-learning quality, most local HEIs are relying on questionnaires to survey students' assessment of the effectiveness of their teaching staff. Such teaching-learning quality monitoring systems should be as cost effective as possible and should be able to be administered in an efficient way so as to reduce time loss by staff and students, reduce paper consumption and clerical handling and to provide timely feedback reports to administrators and teachers. We hope Web-based systems like COSSET should be able to fulfill that role.