This is the first of a few visualizations and analyses on the Rice University Course and Instructor Evaluation data that I plan to publish.
To begin, I wanted to see which courses and departments at Rice have the heaviest and lightest workloads. To do this, I used Tableau to produce an embeddable interactive visualization that allows us to explore the average course workload, broken down by department as well as by course.
The “average course workload” metric is gauged by Rice students’ scaled responses to the following question at the end of every semester:
The workload for this course compared to others at Rice was: 1. Much Lighter 2. Somewhat Lighter 3. Average 4. Somewhat Heavier 5. Much Heavier
The interactive visualization below plots average course workload per department and per course over the past 14 semesters. You can filter the plots by department (e.g. COMP), course (e.g. COMP 182), year, semester, as well as the number of ratings a given department or course received. Additionally, by hovering over different columns and rows, you can sort the plots in different ways (i.e. ascending, descending, alphabetical). I encourage you to play around with the visualization, and to contact me if you have any questions.
The data behind this visualization are available publicly at http://registrar.rice.edu/facstaff/evals/.
Finally, I appreciate any and all feedback! Let me know if there are other metrics you think would be interesting to explore, if anything is confusing, if the site or visualization is broken or hidden, or for whatever reason you like.
Special thanks to Kiryl Novikau and Trenton Alexander for originally giving me the idea and for helping me along the way.