Students have been so engaged with reading assignments on Perusall that I decided to use it for my own end-of-semester course evaluations. I upload a pdf of my course syllabus to Perusall and create an assignment that contains the following instructions:
Review the Course Description and Learning Outcomes on page 1 of the syllabus and answer the questions below.
What elements of the course were the most helpful in helping you achieve these outcomes? Why?
What elements of the course were the least helpful in helping you achieve these outcomes? Why?
How does this course compare to others that you have taken (learned more/less/about the same, topic more/less interesting, etc.)? Why?
What aspects of your life outside of this course helped or hindered your learning? How?
What parts of this course should continue? Why?
Which parts should I eliminate? Why?
What should I add (assignments, exercises, books, articles . . .)? Why?*
The feedback that I get from this Perusall assignment is far more useful than the results of my university’s official evaluation instrument.
*The last three questions come from Simon’s ABC Post-It note exercise.
