Course evaluations

Course evaluations let you collect your students' (and auditors') thoughts and opinions on your courses and faculty. Evaluations give you seven different question types, any of which you can apply either to the course or the instructor. You can also make the evaluation and its results available in different ways:

• When is the evaluation available to students? Set up a timeframe in which they can fill it out.
• When can the course faculty see the evaluation results? You can let the faculty see it after 60% of the course's students have submitted evaluations, or you can restrict it from the faculty altogether. Both of these settings are meant to help preserve student anonymity.
• Do you want to lock grades for students who don't take the evaluation? Set a date by which student grades will be locked for those who haven't.
• Course Evaluations > Settings also lets you decide whether to include teaching assistants in faculty evaluations.

Here's the lifecycle of a course evaluation:

1. An Academic Admin designs the evaluation.
2. You attach it to courses in an academic term.
3. You set the evaluation's availability on the Academic Term page, and adjust it for individual courses if necessary.
4. After students take the evaluation, you can review the results in Academics > Course Evaluations > Reporting.

Creating (or cloning) a new course evaluation

You can create as many course evaluations as you wish. To create a new course eval...

1. Click Add a Course Evaluation.
2. Give the evaluation a name.
3. Click Save to finish.

As soon as you save, you'll be taken to the evaluation's Design view.

You can also create a new evaluation by cloning an existing one:

1. Go to the existing evaluation's Design view.
2. Click Clone this course evaluation.
3. Give the new evaluation a name.
4. Click Clone.

As soon as you clone, you'll be taken to the new, cloned evaluation's Design view.

Designing the evaluation

Evaluations are made of three basic elements: headings, text, and questions. You can also embed an existing evaluation inside this one.

To add a new element:

1. Click the appropriate add link to create the next element (you can find them below the most-recently added element).
2. Enter the content of the heading, text, or question (see below) and click Save.
3. Click embed another course evaluation to insert another evaluation as a single element into the body of your evaluation.

After adding an element:

• Click to edit an element or to delete it.
• Re-order it by clicking and dragging the symbol.

Questions and answers

Questions are the meat of the evaluation. There are lots of options, so here's a walk-through:

1. Click Add question.
2. Type your question in the text area.
3. Select the question type (see below).
4. Depending on the question type you select, you'll see different options (labels, statements, etc.). These options are described below with the question types.
5. Check whether this question is required or not.
6. Select whether the question applies to the course or to the course faculty(which includes teaching assistants, if any.
7. Click Save when you're finished.

There are seven question types:

Likert

This lets students evaluate a number of individual items or statements on some sort of sliding scale. Here's an example.

To set up this type of question:

1. Select a number of labels(in the example, the options along the top).
2. Enter the names of the labels ( Good, Poor, etc.).
3. Statements are the items you want your students to evaluate (the left column in the example). Enter as many statements as you like.

Short answer

Students enter free-form text answers. If you wish, you can limit the number of characters students can enter in their answers.

Essay

Gives your students a large text area for an essay-length answer. If you wish, you can limit the number of characters students can enter in their answers.

Multiple Choice

Your students select one of several answer options.

Number

This type restricts your students' answers to a numerical input. You have options to enter a minimum, maximum, or a range of number values.

Yes/No

Your students check Yes or No in response to your statement.

Multiple Answer

Your students choose one or more answers from a list of options.

After designing your evaluation...

First, have a look at Preview to see how the evaluation will appear to your students.

Then, go to the Courses view to attach it to courses.

1. Select a term from the drop-down.
2. If need be, type in the filter to pare down the course list.
3. Check off the courses to which you wish to attach this evaluation.
4. If a course is half-toned, it is disabled. Disabled courses already have another evaluation attached to them.
5. Un-checking a course disentangles the evaluation from the course (and makes the course available for other evaluations).
6. When you're done, click Attach to these courses at the bottom of the course list (even if you've removed courses from the evaluation).
7. Finally, set the evaluation's availability on the Academic Term page—the directions are below.

How to set Course Evaluation Availability

When you set availability for course evals, you determine when students can take them, whether to lock their grades if they don't submit one, and whether and how faculty will be able to view the submissions.

1. Go to Academic Term > Info.
2. Click edit next to Course Evaluation Availability.
3. Enter the start and end dates/times for when they'll be available to students.
4. Enter a date/time if you wish to lock grades for students who haven't completed the evaluation. Their grades will remain locked until they complete the evaluation. You can also enter a date at which the lock will be lifted even if the student never completes an evaluation.
5. When do you want to make the results available to faculty? Your options are:
   • Not available
   • Available after 60% completion
   • Available after 60% completion and course is finalized
6. Finally, click Save.

After setting up evaluation availability, you can adjust it for individual courses on the Course > Settings view. It works the same as the one described above, except that it also lets you change that course's evaluation.

Reporting

As students begin to submit evaluations, their responses will be tallied in a few places:

• In Academics > Academic Term > Info, you'll see some overall stats in the right column under Statistics.
  • Availability: The percentage of enrollments that have had a course eval offered to them.
  • Completion: The percentage of available evaluations that have been completed.
  • Response Rate: The percentage of overall enrollments that have completed an eval (whether or not one was offered to them).
• The Course > Reporting view lets you see evaluation results for that particular's course and faculty member(s).
• Academics > Course Evaluations > Reporting shows you the results of all completed course evaluations for the current academic term (or the one set as the default in Academics > Settings).

In the latter report, you can use the filter to show evaluations:

• Of courses from a particular campus
• From a range of different academic terms
• A particular course evaluation
• Of courses in a particular student (academic) program
• Of courses in a particular department
• Of a particular faculty member (just type a name and select from the results)
• Particular courses (just type a name or abbreviation and select from the results)

...and any combination of the above.

• Click Export to create a spreadsheet of the report's results.
• Click Print to create a PDF of the report's results.