Student Freedoms Jeopardize Professor's Privacy

With the implementation of Texas House Bill 2504, college students will now have access to any class syllabus, book list, instructor curriculum vitae, and student evaluation reports before registering for classes.

In the spirit of government transparency, the Texas Legislature has unanimously passed, and is now applying, House Bill 2504, the first of its kind in the U.S. Starting Fall 2010, the bill requires all Texas universities to publicly post online information about the instructors, budgets, and classes.

This bill allows students and parents the freedom to preview course material and instructor qualifications before paying, but professors are worried that the access to certain information will negatively influence the classroom.

The Texas Legislature is considering the student population and their parents as consumers in the market of education. "No one would buy a house without researching it first," Texas House Representative Louis W.Kolkhorst (R), author of HB 2504, said. "My inspiration was to really empower the student to make better decisions with very limited dollars."

However, professors all throughout Texas are concerned with several aspects of HB 2504 that edge into privacy and intellectual property issues.

Among many other requirements, HB 2504 involves the online publication of student end-of-course evaluations.

Before the bill was passed, student course evaluations at UTSA were conducted in class using paper surveys, and the results of the evaluations were just one of the tools used by instructors to appraise teaching performance; however, the student evaluations are now conducted and posted on the World Wide Web.

Instructors at UTSA are concerned that the evaluations, once used internally by the University, will now begin to influence the curriculum and teaching methods of professors.

"Student evaluations are only moderately valid," Dr. Carola Wenk, UTSA's chair of Faculty Senate said, and "[Online] student teaching evaluations may encourage professors to dumb down the course in order to keep students happy."

Kolkhorst has pledged to monitor the effects of the published student evaluations admitting professors can be criticized by students that "don't put forth the effort or didn't have the intellectual capabilities."

"We're going to look at that and make sure it's not a huge cost driver or done unfairly," Kolkhorst said,

However, the evaluations have met with some trepidation from professors.

"Why does the Legislation have to watch our teaching evaluations, put them online and see what influences they have?" Wenk asked.

The bill stipulates that visitors to the university website will be able to access syllabi, book lists, curriculum vitae and other pertinent information within three links of the homepage.

Students will be able to see an online version of syllabi and book lists before ever registering for a class. They will find an instructor's curriculum vitae, which explains what degrees and training an instructor has acquired in their careers. Departmental budgets will also be posted bi-annually.

Texas universities already had this information available to the public, but each school had their own design for what was put online, until now. "This makes a uniformed standard in Texas," says Kolkhorst.

Meanwhile, students at UTSA can expect to see the effects of the bill this Fall with the addition of Bluebook,UTSA's answer to HB 2504. "Bluebook will allow a user to search items by faculty name, course subject, academic department and keyword," Carolyn Ellis, OIT Assistant Director of Customer Relations and Communications, said.

A beta version of Bluebook was launched on August 26th and can be found at http://bluebook.utsa.edu. The official version is scheduled to launch October 22, 2010.

Any UTSA student interested in participating with the testing of the beta version can contact the Office of Information Technology at oit@utsa.edu.