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

Introduction

The teacher, course, and peer evaluation are vital components in the effective delivery of a degree
program. These evaluations also provide valuable feedback that can be used in future curriculum

revisions. Therefore, the program review process managed by the Quality Assurance Council of the

University Grants Commission of Sri Lanka has given high priority to these activities. In addition,
student feedback could be an instrument in measuring the accountability of academics (Spiller and

Ferguson, 2011).

Conventionally, student feedback was obtained using paper-based forms. Individual teachers or an

authorized person or a group were responsible to carry out this task. With the rapid advancements in
information technology in the recent past, this could be done effortlessly using online facilities such as

forms or surveys. Google forms were introduced to the Faculty of Agriculture for teacher and course
evaluation in the year 2016/2017. Since its introduction, most of the staff members are using the forms

to get the student feedback on teachers and courses. In this system, the individual teachers or course
coordinators create an instance of the common evaluation form in their google drive and distribute the

link to the target students. Student responses go directly to the Google drive of the form owner. The

form owner can see the results as a comprehensive summary of the feedback. This system is much
better than the paper-based system where the data needs to be manually converted to the electronic

form and analyzed. In the online form system, the teacher could use the feedback to improve his or her
teaching and the course delivery. From the students’ perspective, they have more freedom to evade

providing feedback. Jha et al. (2019) report that there is a decline in the student feedback in many
universities.

The studies conducted by Smith (2020) and Spiller and Ferguson (2011) show that the teachers take
the student feedback positively in most cases. Smith (2020) further explains that most of the teachers

expect to use the feedback as a reflection rather than an evaluation. In addition, some teachers may
hesitate to see a reflection of their practice. Therefore, the teachers may not use the student feedback to

improve their teaching or course improvements if the responses of the teachers were not monitored

adequately. Since the feedback comes directly to the teacher in a form-based online feedback system,
it is entirely up to the teacher to respond to the feedback. There is no convenient mechanism in this

system to ensure that the appropriate response is given to the student feedback. This weakness was
recognized by the reviewers of the program review process. Therefore, a web-based centralized

mechanism was sought and the present paper describes the technical and implementation aspects of the
proposed system. Proposed system is useful in the absence of dedicated software solutions to manage

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