The IDEA Center

We have found IDEA to be extraordinarily useful, not only for acquiring summative, normative data, but also for providing helpful feedback to faculty on how to re-structure the learning environment so that students learn what the faculty members want them to learn.

I find the IDEA papers most stimulating and highly relevant to my teaching which seeks to foster links between theory and practice and encourage scholarship.  The practical tips in particular facilitate students' capacity to try out ideas as they develop their practice and are most welcome.

The Benchmarking for Learning report was tremendously helpful in understanding and utilizing longitudinal information from the IDEA System. Comparisons with the national database and self-selected peers helped us identify issues of excellence and challenge, and gave us feedback on our general education sequence that we couldn't have obtained any other way.

The IDEA Benchmarking for Learning report is fascinating. It clearly points out things we never would have noticed and confirms other things reported through NSSE. The best tool provided in the report is a way, via very clear graphs, to show faculty how we compare to a useful peer group as well as to ourselves over time. The graphs make a great place to start a conversation about whether the differences matter to us or not. It will be very helpful over the next few years to track the data to see if results represent anomalies or trends.

In the benchmark report, we were pleased to see that our students rated their progress on objectives and their progress on learning slightly better than their counterparts at our peer institutions. Some data shapes are particularly interesting for identifying parallels, including the similarity between our peers and us when faculty identify teaching methods.

IDEA has been a terrific tool for us - and we have seen much growth in teaching and learning (from the student perspective) institution-wide - since we have been using it.  Not only does it give faculty members feedback, but it provides multiple resources to consult for the improvement of teaching and learning.

We continue to use the IDEA Feedback system for our department chairs, Dean, and other administrators.  The secure and confidential system works well for our faculty which translates into exceptional response rates.  The system itself provides for rich data on how our faculty and staff view our administrative team and where we can continue to improve.

We really feel like the use of IDEA has evolved into so much more than the original purpose of faculty feedback and evaluation. It wasn’t until we sent a few faculty to a users meeting that we even thought to use it to improve student learning. It wasn’t until we had an IDEA workshop on campus that we even started looking at the group summary reports.

The IDEA course/instructor evaluation tool allows each teacher to tailor assessments around the learning goals they’ve established for their course and students.  Receiving teaching effectiveness feedback centered on areas of greatest personal/professional interest encourages an in-depth review of the data and a commitment to transform results into an action plan for teaching improvement.  The use of a validated student ratings instrument also brings credibility and reliability to the faculty evaluation process.

As Vice President for Academic Affairs, I found the IDEA Administrator Feedback Instrument invaluable to my growth and professional development. It served as an ongoing probe as to how I was meeting the needs of my deans, my staff, and the institution as a whole.

Our Faculty Evaluation Task Force chose IDEA because with one tool we can get input for administrative decision making and ideas for faculty to use in teaching improvements. The diagnostic feedback has become the cornerstone for setting teaching goals for the upcoming year.

The Users Group Meeting is the most valuable conference to attend because of the interaction and sharing between participants and not so much of The IDEA Center teaching. They are facilitating the users to share best practices. Wonderful and useful!

As the faculty developer, I have found the individual reports an excellent starting place for conversations with faculty about teaching and learning.  We have been well satisfied not only with the feedback faculty receive on their individual reports, but also the support provided by the IDEA staff. 

The more we use IDEA the more we like it. IDEA is useful to evaluate and improve teaching effectiveness at multiple levels. We started using IDEA to help us evaluate and improve our instructors' teaching effectiveness, then to assess the effectiveness of our academic programs. 

The IDEA Student Rating System is one of the best instruments available for evaluating instruction.  It provides flexibility in the selection of course objectives, and a national database for comparison.

Use of the IDEA Student Rating system has been a valuable facet of our increasing focus on student learning outcomes.  Having used IDEA for many years, their Instructor and Group Reports have provided us with information to continually improve our teaching and learning - at the classroom, discipline and institution levels.

The IDEA Student Ratings system speaks for itself in terms of comprehensiveness, technical validity, and reliability.  The key benefit to IDEA in my mind is the demonstrated commitment of the staff to meet your organization’s challenges realistically and with empathy for the personal aspects of ratings and evaluations.

With IDEA Online, we have been astonished at the ability to get feedback to instructors within two weeks of the end of classes, in time for them to make changes between semesters. Since we're evaluating roughly 450 classes per term, this is not a small thing!

The system is very user-friendly and the IDEA staff provides excellent customer service in all areas!   They frequently go “above and beyond” the call of duty in their support of the technical and reporting functions of the IDEA system.

The feedback I receive from IDEA, coupled with other forms of ongoing formal and informal feedback, has quite simply made me a better leader.  It is wonderful to receive the IDEA data in such a timely and well-organized fashion.  This allows me to spend more time reflecting on the information....and striving to improve my performance.