CTEC responses this quarter will assess remote learning, won’t be public

Daily file photo by Colin Boyle

The CTEC office is located in the Rebecca Crown Center, 633 Clark St. This quarter’s CTECs will assess the quality of remote teaching.

Isabelle Sarraf, Development and Recruitment Editor

Though CTECs will still be collected during Spring Quarter, responses will not be public, Faculty Senate President and Feinberg Prof. Lois Hedman announced at the April 13 Faculty Senate meeting.

Deans and department chairs also do not plan to use CTECs in “high stakes personal decisions” like salary bonus and promotional evaluations, she said. Instead, this quarter’s course evaluations will focus on gauging student opinions on the transition to remote learning.

Hedman said the Office of the Provost made this decision based on recommendations from the CTEC committee.

At the May Faculty Senate meeting, politicalscience Prof. Stephen Nelson asked if there was a strategy for teaching-track faculty to evaluate remote teaching performance and how that might be used going forward.

Interim Provost Kathleen Hagerty responded, saying evaluations will focus solely on the student experience. She said these CTECs could help faculty as a “vehicle for teaching” in the future if classes are held remotely for another quarter.

“We knew that (remote learning) was very uncertain and it was a very new experience, so we didn’t want to penalize anybody (if) it didn’t go perfectly,” Hagerty said.

Some element of remote learning is part of the University’s plan for the fall, Hagerty told The Daily earlier this month. The question, she said, is how much of the learning will occur remotely.

Art history Prof. Claudia Swan, chair of the Educational Affairs Committee, said some schools — such as Weinberg and the School of Communication — have added questions to this quarter’s CTECs about the quality of remote teaching. She said this spring will be an excellent time for faculty to add questions about their own remote instruction to gather feedback.

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Twitter: @isabellesarraf

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