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© Proceedings of the Ruhuna Quality Assurance Sessions 2021 (RUQAS 2021)
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21 September 2021

MC5
A Web-based Centralized System to Manage Student Feedback and Peer Evaluation at the

Faculty of Agriculture, University of Ruhuna

W.M.C.J. Wijekoon

Department of Soil Science, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Ruhuna, Mapalana, Kamburupitiya.

*Corresponding author: wijekoon@soil.ruh.ac.lk

Abstract

Student feedback and peer evaluations are integral parts of the tertiary education systems. The

response of the teacher to student feedback and peer evaluations depends on the teacher’s perceptions

and professionalism. Despite the personal biases, effective internalization of the feedback-response
cycle is necessary to improve the teaching and learning process of academic institutions.

Conventionally, paper-based questionnaires are used to obtain student feedback on teaching, courses
and peer evaluation. Recent developments in Information and Communication Technology provide

many avenues to carry out these questionnaire-based surveys through online services. Teachers prefer

to use such services over paper-based questionnaires because of their intuitive interfaces, easy sharing
and result analysis tools. Since individual teachers have full control over the student feedback data in

most of the online tools, it is difficult to verify whether the teacher has responded to the feedback
adequately. A centrally administered student feedback and peer evaluation system could collect

responses and convey them to the management for further actions such as guiding and advising the

teachers or improving the courses. Aforementioned tasks can be accomplished easily using tailormade
MIS or LMS and development of such systems could be costly and time consuming. This paper

proposes an online system using google forms as an interim solution to centrally handle the student
feedback and peer evaluations at the faculty level. Since the proposed services are currently free to use,

the faculties can easily adopt them if a local system is not in place. The feedback collected by the
system will be processed by the IQAC of the Faculty of Agriculture using the functions of Google

sheets. A custom-made summary of the feedback will be shared securely with the respective teacher

and the head of the department (HOD) for further actions. This proposal was approved by the Faculty
Board and yet to be implemented and validated.

Keywords: Google Forms, Google Sheets, Teacher Evaluation, Course Evaluation, Feedback-

Response Cycles

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