Abstract

NBIS teaches, among others, bioinformatics courses, which are evaluated with an anonymous survey sent its learners. Part of this survey consists of mandatory questions to assess course quality. However, there is discussion in how useful these questions are in achieving their goal. Here, we describe the history of this survey, how its questions were crafted and selected, followed by a critical evaluation of its final form. We find that no selection criterium has been written down and evidence-based best practices by the academic literature were ignored. This paper is the first to transparently show the crafting and selection of evaluation questions to be used for NBIS evaluation, being the 'future work' as mentioned in its paper most important to this topic.