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| Process of Teaching | Students can be questioned about the process of teaching and the way of instruction of a particular subject by a particular tutor, about course beneficial effect and even the level of skill proficiently of the tutor.
They can be also asked to evaluate different parts of the course (e.g. teaching text, audio-tape) in terms of their relative usefulness.
But of course we should pay attention to the fact that all the responses can be quite and even substantially different. It is because all the people are different with different view points and abilities. The 'relevance', 'interest', 'difficulty', etc. of any unit of instruction will mean something different to each person studying it and an individual student's rating will largely be determined by his or her orientation. For example, a topic that seems to be easy or good taught by a tutor to one person may be difficult and badly explained to the other student.
The estimation of such answers should be very careful. Very often 4-, 5- or 6-point rating scales are used. It is wrong to make an average calculation of all responses of some group, because the difference between points 1 and 2 on the scale is not the same as that between points 2 and 3, etc. responses should be represented in percentage equivalent according every single item.
• General Style of Presentation. The style of the presentation may be the subject matter of tutors questioning the students, both in terms of layout, design, content and so on. About sequence and clarity of the teaching. But in most common cases students can be asked about learning strategy and methods of teaching technique, the extent of adopted material wit the help of it.
But here also we should bare in mind the subjective ness of student’s opinion and evaluation. For example students with an 'instrumental' or 'extrinsic' orientation may prefer a didactic style of presentation, while other students may not.
• Specific Content Issues. For estimators it is important to know how the teaching progress was conducted and by what means. To this end, information about students' problems with key concepts, ideas and relationships, etc. can be of great value to course writers when it is time for revisions to be made. All the reviews are likely to have a positive impact on the study process.
Students may be suggested to evaluate the main key points of the course and state their opinion about how well had they been taught, or may simply be asked to tell about any specific problems they had faced. It may be enough even to mention that the problems occurred. It may be possible for students to suggest whether problems arise from the inherent difficulty of certain ideas, etc., or from the course writer(s) explication in the learning materials. Any indication of the nature of specific difficulties can be of great impotence when revisions are made to the teaching.
To estimate the data from all the students’ feedbacks the questioners were used at the Open University. The questionnaires used for courses in their initial presentation contain some items that are course specific and others that allow comparisons to be made between courses for certain aspects of the information, e.g. workload, use made of course components, etc.
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