How the school require teachers to do with class evaluation, Thailand

After the end of the semester, Thai students can sign in into their account in university website or mobile application to see their grade of every course. For the place, I was in, the students will not be able to see their grade unless they complete the teacher evaluation.

After teachers receive class evaluation from the system, they need to finish the reports for each class and submit the report to school before the beginning of the next semester.

Copyrights by the Sw Eden, 2022

In Thailand, this report is called, TQF (Thai Qualifications Framework for Higher Education). Its length for each class is 10-15 pages (A4 paper with 16-point font size). Based on the form of TQF, teachers will find the strength and weakness from class evaluation and write about them. The form did not require much writing about strength, but weakness. They will ask if the teachers agree or disagree, and why, and how to improve for the upcoming semester.

For example, teachers can type something like this.

Most parts of class evaluation are good, but I would discuss the part that I got moderate scores, which are “lack of learning support tools” and “lack of knowledge exchanging among students.” The students gave the lowest scores for these two items. Even the lowest scores are moderate (about 4 from 5-point Likert scale), the teacher still need to write about it.

I agree with the first blame (lack of learning support tools) but disagree with the second one (lack of knowledge exchanging among students). In the first month, I taught them to do computer animation by using actual software in computer lab at school. Some of my students asked me for the license of the particular software for them to practice at home. I cannot provide them with the license. I do not have free version of them, because it might be illegal to give away the software. These students also mentioned other lecturers, that those lecturers can give them the software and cracked serial numbers.

Later, after COVID outbreak, I let them use free mobile application. It is legal and free for everyone to use. However, students viewed this kind of application as cheap and not professional.

I will never give away those illegal cracking softwares or serial number generators. It should not be the job of teachers to do this illegal for their students. Therefore, I typed in the report that the school or educational institute should support software license for the students especially for the online class that students have to work on their own laptop.

For the second part that I got low in class evaluation (lack of knowledge exchanging among students). Although they might believe that they got lack of knowledge exchange among friends in class, I strongly confirm that one-fifth of their grade are evaluated based on online-class discussion. I let them group to be 5 groups in class, and each group would summarize the texts about their selected topic. After they posted their summary, they must ask 5 open-ended questions for other friends to answer. This means there are totally 25 questions. Each students have responsibility to answer at least 14 answers by providing the opinions to support the answer.

More than half of students in the class earned full score from this part of grading. Some answered the question more than 14 times. It is more than enough, and I verbally admire them even I do not give additional credit.

I still do not understand some students who did not like to type the answers for their friends’ open-ended questions. This question-and-answer activity was in private Facebook group. Only students in the same class can see it. There is nothing to be shy. I think it is easier than on-site class that students need to answer the question in front of all friends in the class.