[ARCHIVED] Course evaluations

[spaul]

Good afternoon everyone:  ​Lorain County Community College will begin using Canvas for the summer semester beginning May 26.  I am in need of your collective expertise.  What are you mechanism are you all using for course evaluations?  We have been able to do so in ANGEL And are brainstorming for future ideas.    Thank you for your time.  Susan

[bacherts]

 @palmarinich ​,

I would have to agree with chriscas​ in regards to the administration of EvaluationKit each term.  Once the initial connections are made, and you have good naming structure for your courses a non-it person would be able to set up the process (with training and documentation).  It took me about an hourish yesterday to setup our EvaluationKit for our spring semester.  It has been a great tool and we have been very happy with it and use it for all courses (face to face and online).  Let me know if you have any other questions would be happy to help.

Thanks, Sam

[jwlipp]

We at UC Berkeley have been using the Blue by Explorance product since 2013 for delivering end-of-term course evaluations for our campus.  What has been very useful to our campus and what have come to appreciate is the flexibility the Blue tool provides in its ability to support a broad range of different evaluation needs and use cases.  We have a fairly decentralized campus with a lot of discretion granted to individual academic units and programs in terms of the content and scheduling of their evaluations.  We have also never encountered issues with load or capacity issues in the Blue software.  Our response rates are typically quite satisfactory most semesters.

The Canvas/Blue LTI integration is fairly straightforward to setup and does allow for easy access for students and instructors into their evaluations for all participating courses.

Overall, we have had good experiences with both the product and with Explorance itself, as they have been flexible and accommodating as our needs have changed over time.

[stephen_woosley]

I'm currently beginning the testing phase to select a new evaluation solution to plug into our Canvas instance here at UNC. Has anyone else tested more than one solution? We're leaning towards EvaluationKIT, but would be willing to give Blue Connector or other products a try.

[PSU_Tony]

Evaluation Kit is awesome.

Sent from my iPhone 6

[tdelillo]

We've been reviewing options, and so far I've been most impressed with EvaluationKit and eXplorance Blue. There are other good tools out there, but those two have the best Canvas integrations IMHO.

[bakerjudy]

We tried EvaluationKit for a few quarters last year at our community college but then decided to switch to CourseEvalHQ (http://etudes.org/products/courseevalhq/). We simply did not get response rates that were high enough to justify the high cost and complexity of EvaluationKit.

Installation of CourseEvalHQ into Canvas was far easier than with EvaluationKit. Furthermore, CourseEvalHQ has tech support and responsiveness to feature requests that are second to none. Two optional but powerful features of CourseEvalHQ that can improve response rates are: 1) automated creation of a separate Module for the survey that can be made required or not, and 2) ability to send a reminder to students who have not completed the survey after a specified amount of time.

[boggsch]

Butte College also had to find a third party solution to receiving feedback from students in our Canvas online courses.  We did extensive research over 12 months and decided to pilot CourseEvalHQ for a semester.  The company representatives are VERY responsive, the software is extremely easy to use, and it was a very enjoyable experience.  Several times customizations that I requested were embraced and incorporated into the software to improve the results for all clients.  I would highly recommend Etudes, Inc. and CourseEvalHQ for gathering online student input into courses.

[qnguyen]

HI All,

So is the EvaluationKIT a good option beside the Survey Monkey? Does it cost to use the LTI? And what if we don't the instructor to see the result, instead sending to someone else?

Thanks

[stephen_woosley]

EvaluationKIT is a great option, but they do charge per paper survey you'd send out in your institution (projected). We're in the process of beginning a pilot, and it seems that the cost will be well worth the benefits. Reporting on the survey results is very granular; I'd imagine you could choose for instructors not to have access to the results, and it is built for admins to see very comprehensive data about the results.

[reynolds1]

We like others have just signed to use EvaluationKit.  We are just now migrated over to Canvas from eCollege.  The survey system was built within the LMS which Canvas does not have.  I found out the creator of the survey system in eCollege is the person who started EvaluationKit and I did find it "spot on" to what we are used to using.  We start in a couple of weeks.  Yes there is a cost depending on your enrollments or FTE--don't recall.

[hdass]

We are considering a pilot and are curious how others developed their assessment questions. 

[reynolds1]

We were able to utilize the same questions we had set up in eCollege as the structure of developing the survey was quite similar.  I couldn't be more pleased with EvaluationKIT.  I am especially pleased that we can make it mandatory for students to complete.  Our response rate is nearly 100%.  The factor that keeps it from being that is there are students still enrolled in courses who have just quit attending and won't withdraw due to FA reasons or maybe just plain "don't care."  We do all we can to encourage them to withdraw if they have quit working in the course.  I truly love this system.  I love the reporting that comes with it.  

[bacherts]

Haylee - when working on our evaluation when we first moved to EvaluationKit at SJC we had a committee of faculty from every school within the college and we took the questions we had with out paper based evaluations, what faculty used in their online classes, questions from the Community of Inquiry survey, and other published surveys.  Then the team met multiple times to review the questions and come up with the 20 or so assessment questions that ended up being our survey that went out to all students online or face to face.  It took several months, but in the end we had an end of course evaluation that all faculty from across the college had input into.

Thanks, Sam

[wli40]

Hello all,

Our institution will be purchasing an online course evaluation system. Can you let me know which department pays for this system at your institution? IT department or Institutional Research Office or other departments? Thanks for your help.

[dgrobani]

We use EvaluationKIT and our Institutional Research department pays for it.