Lesson 9 - Quality Teaching in a Digital Age

12.1. Why Evaluation is Important

For tenure and promotion, it is important if you are teaching to be able to provide evidence that the teaching has been successful. New tools and new approaches to teaching are constantly coming available. They provide the opportunity to experiment a little to see if the results are better, and if we do that, we need to evaluate the impact of using a new tool or course design. It’s what professionals do. But the main reason is that teaching is like golf: we strive for perfection but can never achieve it. It’s always possible to improve, and one of the best ways of doing that is through a systematic analysis of past experience.