A suite of Google services for daily course evaluation

In almost all institutions, students are asked to evaluate the quality of instruction on end-of-semester surveys. Unfortunately, these come too late to affect the quality of instruction in the current semester. They are essentially summative-evaluating what has already happened, mostly for the benefit of third parties, rather than formative-providing information that an instructor can use to improve teaching in the current class. Now, with the advent of freely accessible tools for taking Web surveys, it is easy to obtain formative feedback. This paper reports on a suite of Google forms and Google spreadsheets, along with a Google app for visualizing the results. These Google tools can be used to solicit feedback daily from a set of students in the class. This helps the instructor to keep tabs on how the students react to each class session, and compare the results with the feedback from previous class sessions.