Using iCollege Tools to Collect Evidence of Teaching Success for Your Annual Review

Annual Review time is almost upon us! It’s the hectic season that comes at the beginning of every year, when (after spending a year of ignoring the sage advice of our mentors) we realize that we neglected to keep track of any of our achievements. Maybe that’s just me. Whether you’re great at keeping track of your work or a chaotic mess like I am, you might not know that iCollege stores information about our students’ progress throughout the semester that we can use as evidence of our teaching effectiveness. 

Using the “class progress” section of iCollege, found under “Course Administration,” you can see not only who logged into your class and when, but also how they interacted with the materials and how they scored on tests over time. In your annual report, you can use this information to create a narrative of how your students engaged with your class. Rather than just rely on the student evaluations, you can use your students’ development over time to illustrate the ways that your assignments lead to their learning success, in tangible ways.

For example, the image to the left shows the discussion board progress page. You’ll see that this particular student only created 11 threads (the required amount at this point in the semester) and replied to 20 posts (also required), but she looked at 68 other posts! That’s a high level of interaction with her classmates’ work, and you can do a great deal with that information. This sort of information is useful when you’re writing your annual report and addressing your teaching success. With this information, you could:

• consider the student’s overall grade in the course compared to her interaction with classmates’ work and see if there is any correlation between students’ engaging with the discussion board and overall grade in the course.
• look at engagement with the discussion board right before a test and see if students with high engagement before the test scored higher.
• check to see if early participation is a predictor of success in your class and make plans to use that information in future semesters. 

You’ll probably come up with a million other ways to use the information based on your class dynamics. The point is that the data stored in iCollege provides many opportunities for you to add analytical data related to teaching your annual report.

In addition to using the “class progress” tool, you can use look at your Quiz statistics (link found in the quiz section of iCollege). This tool will show you how students responded to questions and when you look at their work on all of their quizzes/tests, you might be able to track trends. 

Here, for example, I can see that my students struggled with this quiz. The average grade distribution was in the low 70s. Looking at these statistics, however, reminded me that I switched up the quiz this week to move from asking them to recall information (multiple choice) to asking them to use information (short answer). Knowing that helped me make sense of an anomaly in their scores. They struggled on this test because I was asking them to try something new. Once they got the hang of it, their scores went right back up to where they were before. Perhaps I didn’t prepare them enough for this shift or perhaps this shift in thinking patterns will always lead to a temporary dip in results. Either way, I can use this information to think deeper about my students’ work and the success of my instruction. 

These types of reports are also available for rubrics if you use those as well.  All of this information can be helpful in a year when many of us haven’t felt like we’ve had as much connection with our students. Hopefully, looking over this will give you a little peace of mind and a firmer grasp on how your students have been doing this year, so that when you get ready to sit down and write your annual report, you’ll feel prepared.