What are you using for course evaluations?

Alexander.K.510

Hi All!

We are currently looking for other ways to evaluate our courses. Right now, we are using Explorance Blue. Is anyone using or doing anything different?

Thanks!

Sam.B.358

We were using the Course Surveys & Evaluations tool by Watermark and just signed a contract with Qualtrics Course Evaluations, since we've had a long standing relationship with them as our survey tool provider. Haven't implemented it yet though, should be done in the next month or so.

Sam.B.358

Hey Alex,

So sorry! I just saw this.

The watermark tool was super easy to integrate (Once they turned the LTI tool on for me on their side, months later… struggled with it forever because it was turned off on their side.)

Qualtrics seems to be a bit more complicated, we're in the middle of implementation for that now and the LTI isn't working. Their implementation team is through a 3rd party too, so they open tickets with qualtrics when something doesn't work right.

Have been stuck on this for a couple of weeks now.

Alexander.K.510

Thanks, Sam! If you don't mind me asking, how easy are those two to implement?

Steve.B.446

Does anybody have any strategies for getting good engagement with these evaluations? We're finding what we think is a lot of apathy and survey fatigue and students don't see any benefit from evaluating the course, so this leads to low engagement.

Do any of the third party solutions mentioned have any tricks to combat this?

Alexander.K.510

@Steve.B.446 Honestly, we have had better luck building the surveys using the Survey Tool in Brightspace. I think students are more inclined to do this because it looks like just another piece of the class than something extra. We are working now on trying to use Insights Report Builder to try to get a report of survey responses.

Andy.L.2

Hi, Alex

We too are using Explorance Blue, but are having to switch.

Our Provosts office is looking at Qualtrics for course evals, but from what Sam is saying with the integration team being another 3rd party does complicated matters.

I like the idea of using the Brightspace survey tool, and when I saw the anonymize checkbox this may be the replacement we're looking for.

You should be able to get Survey responses from advance data-sets in the data hub. Then process through a visualization tool.

Adam.F.692

Hello,

I have a little experience with a bunch of these systems. We are currently using Explorance Blue for our course evaluations, we have used Qualtrics for some supplemental surveys, and have used the Brightspace survey tool for Faculty Development Surveys. Everything said and done we keep coming back and moving these surveys to BLUE. For the surveys using Qualtrics our Institutional and Assessment groups was sending questions for assessing things like new tools in the class and they were getting about 10% response rate. It was then decided that we would add these questions onto the course evaluation and the response rate of them went up to 35% to 40%. We also used the Brightspace tool for our Faculty Development surveys but data for those can only be pulled 1 class at a time (at least in our experience) so since our Provost decided they needed this information the decision was to have use move these into BLUE so all the data can be pulled at once and reports can be created and distributed automatically.

Overall I have found BLUE to be a very versatile tool that can handle just about anything if you are creative enough. We still do have issues with response rates but from what I have noticed from conversation with other institutions is that if you want a response rate about 40% you need to engage the faculty and have them encourage students to complete their survey. This is difficult for use since we are an online state university and can not use some of the options that are available to more traditional schools.

The automatic distribution of reports, the exporting data daily to our data warehouse, the ability to survey subgroups within courses and really the flexibility to do just about any survey with any population that is in our data source using any schedule has made it the primary tool that we use for surveys in our department.

Holly.L.318

I agree with Adam.F.692’s post. We are currently using Explorance Blue for our course evaluations and have found it a versatile tool for other surveys as well.

Overall Lansing Community College has had a better experience using Blue for course evaluations than our previous solution IDEA.