Course Evaluation

Several reasons went into the decision to adopt online course evaluations: 

• They provide YOU, the faculty member, MUCH quicker feedback for your courses. Rather than having to wait weeks—if not months—for valuable feedback for your courses, you will now see your feedback almost immediately after the feedback period ends for students, which is just after final grades are due.
• Students will—for the first time in most programs—be able to offer typed comments that they know will be completely anonymous. This will provide additional feedback beyond the traditional Likert-scale feedback you have seen before. During our focus group sessions held in Spring 2011, our students were extremely enthusiastic about having this option of open-ended comments. For the first time, they can clarify some of the reasons for selecting certain options in the Likert scale part of the survey.
• The cost of administering paper-based surveys was increasingly prohibitive. It was getting to the point that surveys would soon cost $0.50 per survey to process. And that is not even factoring in the manual labor involved in distributing the surveys via campus mail, collecting them, and then mailing them back to the processing center.
• We are among the last cohort of colleges and universities to shift to online feedback. We can use to our benefit what has been learned from more than ten years of research and practice.

CoursEval is the platform we are using for the online course evaluations. They are a partner with Jenzabar, the company that makes our myDU portal, so it ties in nicely with our online registration system. Even as a stand-alone system, however, CoursEval has generally received praise in the higher education community for creating very configurable surveys with superb reporting capabilities.

Generally, there will be a two-week window, ending just prior to the last week of the regular meeting of classes, in which students will be able to complete course evaluations. Students will receive an email announcing when the survey period is open. Students will NOT be able to submit a course evaluation after the grade submission deadline.

First, an email will be sent out to all students indicating the course evaluations are available in myDU. The survey instrument being used, CoursEval, ties into our myDU site. When students log into myDU, they will also see links indicating which survey(s) remain to be taken for each class. 

We have created a video for students showing them how to access their surveys; you are welcome to view it, too, of course. It will be available here in the near future.

That is a valid concern. Response rates are, in fact, generally lower for online surveys according to most literature in the field. At the same time, the literature also points out that the responses submitted are more valid—especially with comment boxes available. Here is a link to one article available on the web indicating general student preferences. The same journal has an earlier article comparing the effectiveness of online versus traditional. The producers of the software we used, CoursEval, have also addressed this topic with some of their own research. Here is how you can help ensure a good response rate: 

• Tell your students how much you value their feedback for a class; that you have used what you have learned in past student evaluations, and applied them for the next time you taught a class.
• Now that these surveys are online, tell them that you will receive the feedback much quicker than before, so that you can even make adjustments (if necessary) to the class between semesters, which was almost impossible before—especially from fall to spring.
• About midway through the course evaluation window, we will send out emails to you indicating the number of expected student responses for each of your course and the actual number of responses received—you will NOT see the names of students.
• If they are available, consider reserving a computer laboratory for your students to take the survey. (However, be aware that our student focus groups indicated that they valued the fact there was no "ticking clock" when doing an online survey on their own, outside of class.) If you choose this option, you should treat the class time as you did for in-person surveys and leave the room.
• Students will see reminders posted on the Campus News page of myDU, and also a general Announcement posted in all Blackboard course sites.

Your survey results will be available to you in your myDU account after final course grades have been submitted.

Yes; the general University-wide questions are available here. Individual departments or Schools also have their own supplemental questions that were agreed upon by the department or School. Such questions will appear after the University-wide questions.

The instrument for the University-wide questions was developed by the Task Force on Student Ratings of Teaching Effectiveness, which met during the 2010-2011 academic year. The questions were checked by an outside consultant from the Searle Center at Northwestern University, and then vetted by the Provost's Cabinet. Individual School or department questions were agreed upon by the faculty in each division, and were generally limited to no more than five additional questions.

Not yet. While we go through our first implementation year, we will be focusing on ensuring that the proper protocols are in place so that evaluations are appropriately administered and the subsequent student reports are disseminated in a timely manner. During the first year we will be working with the college and schools to develop a flexible process that will allow faculty to submit their own questions that they would like included on the course evaluation survey.

The course evaluation has a set of questions geared towards the course and another set of questions that pertain to the course instructor(s). The course-based questions are asked only once during the evaluation. The instructor-based questions are repeated for each instructor. The instructor’s name appears with the appropriate set of questions.

There are several reasons course evaluations are critical for everyone at Dominican University: 

Course evaluations help your instructors develop their courses and improve their teaching. Dominican University has historically been considered an excellent teaching university, and our faculty members value your input. 

Our vision statement, "Dominican University aspires to be a premier, Catholic, comprehensive, teaching university," carries with it a responsibility to have an excellent teaching faculty. This survey is your opportunity to indicate how well we have fulfilled that vision. 

The online course evaluation being offered allows several opportunities for you to type in your own comments, in addition to the traditional style of questions where you select a number from a scale. Our student focus groups told us that these were especially valuable, as students can now type in specific comments explaining why certain responses were given on the survey—and they remain anonymous.

You should understand that these evaluations help our faculty improve the quality of their courses, and as such are a part of the educational process—both yours as well as your faculty member's. The information is shared with each faculty member's Dean and/or department chair, so your input helps shape important curriculum decisions for that class and, indeed, the entire department or School. 

You should be aware that faculty members will receive emails indicate the percentage of participation, but not the names of individuals who did or did not complete the surveys.

Yes. Even though we know which courses you are taking and, therefore, which course evaluations you are to complete, all results within that survey are anonymous. Your instructors can not see who completed which survey. The most information your instructors will receive is an email indicating the percentage of students who completed the survey in each class, as a way of encouraging 100% completion. In the report distributed, faculty members will see the aggregated results for those responses that require a numeric input; typed comments are grouped together in each section. There is no way to tell who said what. 

You are welcome to check out a video we created showing the instructor's viewpoint available here.

Some faculty members—to encourage as close to 100% participation as possible—will reserve a computer classroom for the class to complete the course evaluation. This is only because your instructor values your feedback, and because (historically) online surveys have tended to have lower return rates than surveys distributed on paper in a class. As always, the results are completely anonymous. (Additionally, your faculty member should leave the classroom, just as though a paper survey were being completed.

You will receive an email with a link to each survey to complete. Additionally, every time you login to myDU with your ID and PIN, you will see a portlet on the screen notifying you which surveys are to be completed with links to those surveys.

Yes; the University-wide survey is available here in PDF format. (Individual departments or Schools may have also developed additional questions that are not listed on that form.) The University-wide questions were developed during the 2011-2011 academic year by the Task Force on Student Ratings of Teaching Effectiveness, and included feedback from several student focus groups.

Many students in our focus groups asked us this, too, and this is one area where we chose not to go along with student opinion—at least for the University-wide questions. (School or departmental questions may vary from this.) We strongly believe that you should be able to honestly evaluate each of the statements posed in the University-wide survey. Research has shown that a neutral response option basically tells us nothing about what is being measured. Given the importance of teaching at Dominican University, these are all statements for which you should have an opinion and not be "neutral" about.

Generally, there will be a two-week window, ending just prior to the last week of the regular meeting of classes, in which students will be able to complete course evaluations. Students will receive an email announcing when the survey period is open. Students will NOT be able to submit a course evaluation after the grade submission deadline.

CoursEval is the name of the company that provides the software for the surveys. They are a partner with Jenzabar, which makes our myDU portal. This close alliance makes it easier to deploy the surveys to the correct students, since it ties in with our registration system.

No. Faculty members will not be shown results in their specific courses until after the date final grades are due. Additionally, survey results are anonymous, and even typed comments cannot be traced to specific students.

Contact the survey administrator and your evaluations will be reset.

No; the reports sent to the instructors are merged together, so that cross-listed courses receive but one report for that class period, with no distinction of discipline. A class from ABC discipline that is cross- listed with XYZ discipline will still generate only one report to the faculty member.