Dr. Sandra Jarvis-Selinger

In a blog post just before the holiday season, and after the craziness of the exam period, I want to take the opportunity to wish you all the best for the holiday season and hope you have a relaxing break before 2016 is upon us.

For this blog post I wanted to focus on giving feedback to the Academic Portfolio and getting feedback from the portfolio. You’ve already been asked to give your opinions about your instructors and courses and we thank you for your participation. I want to stress how important this is for the all our academic offerings including the BSc (Pharm), E2P PharmD and Grad PharmD programs.

These surveys are important for us to gather information about how students experience each program and they provide a unique perspective for our planning and ongoing quality continuous improvement. As I’ve said many times, students are the only group that experiences every aspect of an educational program. Faculty and staff see only parts of the whole – a lecture, session, course or year – but not in the way that you experience it.

And we need a variety of voices. Getting enough students to complete the survey is also important to understand how to target what changes we need to make and what we should keep the same. Everyone will potentially have a different way of looking at things and we value understanding all of those perspectives.

Over this last term we launched five different survey types which included: Student Evaluation of Teaching (SEoT) and Course Evaluation (CE) surveys for both the BSc(Pharm) and PharmD programs; and the PharmD Orientation, Study Habits and Module Evaluation surveys for the PharmD program.

For the BSc(Pharm) program we launched 24 surveys last term (16 SEoTs and 8 CEs). For core courses we had a 19% response rate; up from 9% last year. This is definitely an improvement but we want to see this closer to the UBC average (~25-30%). Response rates for our elective courses in the BSc program was 73%; similar to previous years. Great job! For the PharmD we administered four SEoT surveys in PHRM 100 with response rates at 48%. In addition to the teaching evaluations we launched four module evaluations (ME) surveys to get feedback on all the modules in PHRM 100. Response rates on closed ME surveys was 72% and overall 43% for both open and closed surveys to date. Again great job!

But you might ask … how does this make a difference to me and how will I know? The Academic Portfolio, which includes myself, Program Directors, Course and Year Coordinators, program staff, etc., has made a commitment to “close the loop”. Once we have your input, we are committed to providing you an overview of the student feedback we’ve received and how we are taking action where we need to. Through the student pipeline and our Connect sites, we will be communicating back to you in the new year. This feedback is meant to help you understand how your feedback is being used and this will also help us be accountable to our promise of continuous quality improvement, which has always been a foundational goal of our Academic Portfolio. As I wrote at the beginning of this blog … having a voice does (and will) make a difference!

Again I want to wish you and your family a fantastic holiday season and look forward to rejoining everyone in 2016 for more academic adventures.

— Dr. Sandra Jarvis-Selinger
Associate Professor and Associate Dean, Academic

Follow