Lounge

In my mind, what's saddest is that those teachers who could rethink their teaching strategies a bit are probably not the ones who will do so based on such a site.
Of course, it's a bit like course evaluations in universities. But these are less targeted and quite likely nastier. Like course evaluations, it can be difficult to read some of these comments. "You need a tougher back!" Well, maybe, but we also need other ways to assess the quality of teaching.
As anything online, nobody will be able to stop this. But we can certainly find more appropriate ways to evaluate learning, teaching, and collaboration.

As for what's more difficult. It seems to me that it depends less on the clientèle than on the overall context. Have only taught universities, so far, but some of the most difficult contexts were the ones in which there was an incompatibility between my teaching and the students' approaches.
As is often the case, it's quite difficult to tell who has it easy.

I think it is a really bad, awful thing. (Just saw this after I had posted about it already.)

There are very few outlets to get information of this nature. I went to school once upon a time and I knew very well which teachers were good, bad and indifferent. I had a look at my own school's ratings and was surprised, to say the least, that the shape of the data was inline with my own opinions of teachers that taught me. I was even more surprised to see that those that I thought were excellent were all scoring above 4.7/5 and that slanderous comments were few and far between.

I'd take the site with a pinch of salt, but if I was a teacher and was scoring poorly I think I would start to revise the way I was teaching -- as the opinions, no doubt, will persist for a long time.

Thanks for the link and the chance to get some things off my chest I have been carrying around for more than 2 decades (and also to share some positive thoughts in a few cases as well)!

I really like the idea of anonymous rating of teachers--WITHIN A MOODLE SITE.

Could we make such a feature/module? I, as a teacher, would love to get feedback, trivial or serious, on my teaching. I could also make comments on teachers that I like or don't like. Here would be some requirements:

• anonymous even to administrators
• customisable variety of criteria (clarity, helpfulness, easiness were on one site)
• composite views of all comments
  
• rate the raters (was this review helpful? yes, no)
• maybe also combine a "rate the course" feature--on the quality or usefulness of the course aim, content and activities
• clear rules about what is public and what is done privately via another channel (ie: complaints about sexual harassment could go to an ombudsman email address). And what might be deleted by a moderator (offensive language).
  

Any other requirements I forgot? Any reason we should not do this kind of module? How about a "rate the students" version too?

I subscribe to a teacher list, the tpic of Rate my Teachers was a huge topic last month. Someone posted this site, called rate my students. It's an interesting read:

http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/