LectureBuddy: Towards Anonymous, Continuous, Real-time, and Automated Course Evaluation System

Student’s course evaluations are a primary tool for measuring teaching effectiveness. The traditional practice in course evaluation at most institutes is carried out once, at the endof each semester. The effectiveness of this system requires candid participation from the students, followed up by the administration, and the faculty. While corrective action took place behind the scenesover a long period, students never observedany immediate change(s) based on the feedback they were provided through the existing course evaluation systems. This discourages students from considering the evaluation seriously. In this paper, we investigate theneed for an innovative system to replace the existing course evaluation systems. We conducted two separate surveys from 210 students and 67 teachers to gain insight into the existing course evaluation systems. The survey participants answered questions based on the tendency of feedback provided by students, method of teacher’sevaluations, frequency of evaluations conducted by institutes, and steps to make classrooms more interactive. We also conducted a comprehensive statistical analysis of the data collected from the surveys, both qualitative and quantitative. Our study showed a need for an innovative course evaluation system to continuously gather student feedback throughout the semester anonymously. These findings led us to develop the prototype of an innovative course evaluation system, “Lecture Buddy”, which is anonymous, continuous, real-time, and automated and which alleviates the shortcomings of the traditional course evaluation systems.