If you’ve driven on the highway between Kolding and Esbjerg, you’ve passed Vejen on the halfway point. Vejen Business College has been here for over 100 years – but you wouldn’t know it: today it’s a state-of-the-art school with a very green and sustainable profile. It’s not the only thing that’s green – the ETU has shown for several years that students’ social well-being and learning environment are above the national average. But with an imminent focus on creating the best conditions for students’ education, Vejen Business College wanted to increase the focus on teaching evaluation even more.

The right framework for a new questionnaire
The Pedagogical Committee at Vejen Business College had long wanted to develop a new questionnaire to inspire students to reflect on their own learning environment – focusing on the student’s own efforts, teaching, the teacher’s role, feedback and professional development. Finally, there was a desire for a series of questions tailored to individual subjects.

“We knew it was a major project we were opening up in the Pedagogical Committee, but our focus on creating an even better education for our students and letting their voice be heard made us start turning traditional evaluation questionnaires upside down,” says Head of Pedagogy Tommy Bach Christensen. Learners should only engage with the learning after they have engaged with their own efforts. The entire framework is inspired by Dorte Ågård and Søren Keller’s “Pedagogical leadership in theory and practice” and is rooted in theorists such as Bandura, Ryan and Deci, Hattie,” Tommy elaborates.

Opinoma held a presentation and it turned out that Opinoma’s proprietary sentence builder was the perfect match for the new question framework. Here, students had to complete a sentence by choosing their own answer.

“Opinoma was the only solution that could support the questionnaire. Both we and our students are happy with the new questionnaire – and the platform.” Tommy continues.

Marselisborg Gymnasium, located in Aarhus, decided to create clearer and common guidelines for student evaluations at the school. Head of Education Hans Christian Hulvej was researching the market for platforms to support a new practice and came across Opinoma. Opinoma was invited to host a one-hour demonstration of the educational assessment software platform, and it was the start of a great collaboration on the future of assessment practice.

“We found Opinoma’s platform to be a good and intuitive system that met our expectations for a new system. The system was easy to use for both students and teachers, and it would give us as a management team a good opportunity to get a complete overview of the evaluations,” says Hans Christian Hulvej.

The subject groups are involved in the work with teaching evaluation
The teaching evaluation was based on one of Opinoma’s templates. This resulted in over 190 evaluations with over 3000 student responses. Marselisborg Gymnasium was then able to work with the data in Opinoma, including comparing classes and subject groups, in order to find trends, identify areas where the subject groups were particularly good and some opportunities for improvement.

“We helped design a number of normal frameworks for the results we want to achieve on various parameters, including student motivation, well-being and initiatives such as varied teaching. These normal frameworks allow our trainers to see where things are going well and where they can be improved. After everyone has evaluated, we have meetings with the teams to see if there were any areas that needed special attention, says Head of Education Mikkel Hollænder Jensen.

A crucial tool for measuring educational initiatives
Marselisborg Gymnasium wanted to implement a formative evaluation practice where teaching evaluation is carried out systematically, thus creating a comparable data basis that can show whether the educational initiatives also have a positive impact on student motivation and teaching quality. The school has a clear expectation that Opinoma’s platform can be a crucial tool in that process.

“A very big strength of Opinoma is their support. We find that they are always ready to help with various questions that inevitably arise when a new system is implementedsays Head of Education Mikkel Hollænder Jensen.