Background: Students and education authorities are expressing an increasing demand for educational quality and student involvement in higher education. We present a descriptive observational study of a student-initiated system for evaluation of lectures in the medical degree programme at the University of Oslo.
Material and method: Criteria-based student evaluations of 445 lectures in the first and second year of the medical degree programme were conducted in spring and autumn 2017 and spring 2018; after each lecture, three students completed a questionnaire about the lecture. The responses were sent by email to the lecturer on the same day. We performed an analysis of the evaluations, a group interview with the cohort's elected representatives, and a questionnaire survey among the lecturers who received an evaluation.
Results: The lecturers received generally good feedback, but the student evaluations also indicated a clear potential for improvement: 21 % of the lectures were not adapted to the volume of information, 32 % did not point out the association with the learning outcomes, 31 % failed to activate the students and 40 % did not provide a summary at the end of the lecture. The cohort's elected representatives had a positive attitude to the evaluation scheme, but requested a simpler technical solution. Almost all the lecturers welcomed the student evaluation, and more than half had used the evaluations to improve their lectures.
Interpretation: This quality development project shows how students, teachers, administration and management can collaborate to improve the teaching.