Evaluation Instruments

If you are planning on teaching a course that involves HFOSS, we would be most appreciative if you would do some evaluation of the impact of HFOSS. You don’t have to be teaching an entire course that includes HFOSS. Feedback would be helpful for ALL courses, including those that only include an assignment or module that includes HFOSS.

The form of evaluation that we have been using is a combination of pre and post course surveys. The most recent versions are linked to this page. Given that we are using HFOSS in different courses, some of the questions need to vary between courses. Therefore, we have provided two sets of documents; two Template documents that contain questions common to all courses and two Content Question documents that contain sets of questions specific to courses:

Student Survey – Pre Template V2.1 – This document is intended to be given at the beginning of the term and contains common questions and two Likkert scale evaluation sets. These items are likely common for all courses. This document also contains a line titled: < Content Likert Question Set Here >. This section is intended to be replaced by questions that are specific to your course from the set provided in the Content Questions – Pre V2.1 document.

Student Survey – Post Template V2.1 - This document is intended to be given at the end of the term and contains the same set of questions in the Student Survey – Pre Template V2.1 document except the questions are posed in the past tense. This document also contains a line titled: < Content Likert Question Set Here >. This section is intended to be replaced by questions that are specific to your course from the set provided in the Content Questions – Post V2.1 document.

Content Questions – Pre V2.1 - Contains two sets of content questions for CS2 and Software courses that are intended to be inserted in the appropriate location in the Student Survey – Pre Template V2.1 document.

Content Questions – Post V2.1 - Contains two sets of content questions for CS2 and Software courses that are intended to be inserted in the appropriate location in the Student Survey – Post Template V2.1 document.

To set up the pre-course survey:

1. Open the Student Survey – Pre Template V2.1.doc
2. Open the Content Questions – Pre V2.1.doc
3. Copy either the “CS 2 Statement” or the “Software Engineering Statement” from the Content Questions document to replace the “< Content Likert Question Set Here >” section in the Student Survey – Pre Template V2.1 document.

Obviously you would go through a similar process for the post-course survey. If you feel that you need different content questions for a course that you are teaching (e.g., databases, etc.), we would be happy to work with you to define those questions.

All the instruments discussed here have IRB approval via the Western New England University IRB. If you define additional content questions, we would be happy to get IRB approval at WNE for them and add them to the shared template set. While you will still need to satisfy your own IRB, at many institutions approval by another IRB can simplify the approval process.

Please feel free to drop the foss2serve team an email if you’d like help with the surveys. Also, if you are able to provide examples of student work, that would also be most appreciated!