TLL Teaching Evaluation Protocol

The TLL Teaching Evaluation Protocol covers subjects run by the Faculty of Engineering and IT at the University of Melbourne. It does not cover subjects run by any other Faculty, nor anything outside the UniMelb scope. Other Faculties may have their own equivalent protocol, you should check with your teaching and learning leadership to see if one is available for you to use.

The TLL Teaching Evaluation Protocol allows the use of any data which the subject coordinator would reasonably have access to as part of their role in conducting teaching evaluation. It does not add any data collection capabilities beyond this baseline - it simply allows the use of data you already have access to when writing SoTL research publications.

This may include learning analytics data from the Canvas learning management system, students' submitted work or grades, centrally-run teaching evaluation surveys, structured observations or surveys you run in class such as minute papers, etc.

Note that in all cases the data must be about students within FEIT subjects. Data about other students, data about teachers or professional staff, data about people outside the university, are not covered by the protocol. You may wish to submit a normal human research ethics protocol if your project would benefit from any of these.

The TLL Teaching Evaluation Protocol uses a combination of implied consent, and consent waiver approaches, depending on the nature of the data source and what is being collected. This allows for the publication of true and complete teaching evaluation data rather than non-representative subsets.

This approach carries a significant obligation to ensure that data is aggregated and de-identified appropriately, and that the topics under study fit the protocol requirements. When discussing your intended project we will go through this in detail.

The TLL Teaching Evaluation Protocol is very broad in the topics that are allowed - anything which is of interest to you as a teacher when evaluating your subject is likely to be allowed, with some key disallowed topics.

Topics likely to be sensitive or involving increased risk, such as disclosure of cheating, experiences as a member of a disadvantaged or minority group, mental health concerns, etc. are not covered by the protocol. This does not mean that these topics are not important for research - however the implied or waived consent model this protocol uses is not appropriate for these topics. You should submit a custom ethics protocol application through the normal processes if this is an area you would like to study. Topics involving experimental treatment, (such as deliberately changing the experience of some students and not others for the purposes of research) are also not covered by this protocol.

Topics this protocol is often used for include evaluating student performance (mastery of learning outcomes) and/or experience (student satisfaction and affective responses) in response to new or changed teaching activities, benchmarking student confidence and understanding relating to new technology such as generative AI, understanding cohort difference such as cross-disciplinary backgrounds. We always love to hear about new topics for evaluation as well.

While the protocol does allow for retrospective use of data (for instance if something unexpected occurs and you would like to evaluate possible causes using historic data), this carries the risk of data not being allowed under the protocol and being excluded. It is best to discuss your intended evaluation prior to data collection beginning, so that we can ensure your intended topics and processes are consistent and may be used in publication.

You may discuss your intended project at one of the regular IDEAS Scholarship of Teaching and Learning group meetings where we often discuss similar intended and ongoing projects, or you can meet separately by emailing feit-tll@unimelb.edu.au.

Once you have a project planned, submit a project form to register your project under the protocol. A reminder that under the protocol requirements you must have explicit approval from the Teaching and Learning Laboratory Director for all publications prior to any submission.