THE PERCEPTIONS OF ACADEMICIANS REGARDING THE ONLINE PERFORMANCE EVALUATION PROCESS

The importance of performance of the academicians of a faculty of education is apparent, given the fact that the faculty has got the mission of training the teachers of future. It is a widely accepted belief that the sine qua non of the performance management is the performance evaluation, which is the process of measurement of success level according to previously defined standard criterions and the evaluation of the measurement results. In the Ahmet Kelesoglu Faculty of Education at University of Selcuk (Turkey), the undergraduates rate their instructors online before loading the web site promulgating their final test scores. The aim of our study is to gain some insight into how the academicians from different departments of the Ahmet Kelesoglu Faculty of Education perceive the aforementioned performance evaluation process and what kind of suggestions on the quality development of the performance evaluation they can provide. The study was designed as an exploratory qualitative study mainly based on the semi structured interviews with seven academicians from five different departments of the faculty. However, in order to add richness to the comments of the participants, views of the 25 senior students of the faculty have been gathered in written form so as to inform the interviewees on the criticisms of the undergraduates. The participants shared their views on the present performance evaluation system as well as their comments on the undergraduate criticisms on the system. The study also features the quality of a back ground study because both of the researchers are presently insiders of the faculty, thus they are very well acquainted with the particular conditions of the organization in question. The findings were also discussed in the context of higher educational system of Turkey.