Explorance Launches Blue 5.5.4 Featuring Dynamic Response Rate Monitoring

At Explorance, we’re committed to continuous improvement in ourselves and the products we offer to our customers. With this in mind we’re excited to launch Blue 5.5.4 with a variety of new features, improved functionality, and updates for higher education institutions. In response to customer feedback, Blue 5.5.4 includes four major themes: response rate monitoring, user interface and administrator interactivity enhancements, project management updates, and further report advancements. Below, we highlight the key features of Blue 5.5.4 and how institutions can use them to simplify the course evaluation process.

Dynamic response rate monitoring

Blue 5.5.4 is the first release to include new dynamic response rate monitoring. Now all users, depending on their role and privileges, can monitor student response rates in real-time during the course evaluation period. This live view allows decision-makers to adjust their strategy to increase participation and engagement. Instructors can track responses across all subjects and use one click filtering, searching, and grouping to dig deeper into data. Stakeholders are able to view the overall status of projects, detailed demographics, and see where responses are coming from, by device, browser, and location. By examining how each access point is converting, administrators will be able to adjust their course evaluation strategy mid-stream to increase participation.

User interface and administrator interactivity enhancements

This new release contains many UI/UX enhancements that incorporate feedback from internal and external reviews. Users have the ability to manipulate question and report lists on the course evaluation form with enhanced mouse button actions. Multiple questions can be selected and their properties changed (mandatory, hidden, etc.) depending on individual preferences. Questions and report blocks can now be reordered by simply using the mouse to drag and drop them to a new location. Users can also view breadcrumbs on projects and reports to easily track their position and navigation path. Sign in and sign out pages are customizable allowing institutions to include their logos, colors, and other images.

For administrators, Blue 5.5.4 offers increased data monitoring features. Email notifications can be triggered when data is imported regardless of the method. An import log is included in these notifications which are customizable for each datasource and alert administrators of any issues that arise.

Project management updates

With the updates to the project management console, the start and end of a course evaluation can be automatically configured based on any date field available. Analytics data including the device, browser, operating system, and geographic location can be captured for Form Fill Out tasks and easily exported to a CSV file for further analysis. This information will help decision-makers determine how and where raters are accessing their course evaluations helping them better optimize course evaluations.

Report advancements

New report enhancements include a custom color selector, additional calculations and optimized queries that add even more power to Blue reports. With the intuitive color selector, administrators can customize graphs and charts to improve the look and feel of the finished report. Percentile ranking calculations are now an option in the Spreadsheet report block and indicate the percentage of scores that are at or below the score being examined. Substantial optimizations were made to the merged subjects (i.e. cross-listed courses) reporting functionality. Blue now implements a multi-threaded process to quickly and efficiently generate the necessary reports.