Student Evaluations of Teaching: Using Big Data Visualization to Explore Challenges and Opportunities

Teaching evaluations are commonly used in educational institutions to assess and improve the quality of education. They provide a structured mechanism for gathering student feedback, allowing educators to gauge their teaching effectiveness, make pedagogical enhancements, and enhance communication with their students. However, student evaluations have a large potential for bias. Striking a balance between the advantages and limitations of teaching evaluations is crucial for their fair and effective use in educational settings. Formal teaching evaluations collected by educational institutions, which are based on review criteria defined by the school, are not shared with the students, and track completion percentages. On the contrary, RateMyProfessors.com is a popular website that enables students to publicly share informal reviews of their teachers. Although the unstructured nature of the data collected by the website has raised many concerns about their reliability and objectivity, in this paper, the authors present the results of a study that explored how data visualization could help teachers and prospective students navigate the challenges and opportunities offered by informal teaching reviews available on RateMyProfessors.com, and how contextual information might help users achieve a more informed perspective and gain better insight from the data.