5 Operational Benefits of Online Course Evaluations

As you read in our last post, there are a number of practices that you might want to consider in order to make a smooth transition to an online course evaluation system. Transitioning from a paper to an online course evaluation has a myriad of benefits, both strategic and operational. From an operational standpoint, your institution can save time and money, gather better quality & more relevant results, and give you more flexibility in how you set up your course evaluations.

1. Lower costs:

   Once your new system is installed, you may see at least a 50% savings in the ongoing costs. Significant cost savings are achieved as you no longer have to print, distribute, collect, scan, rekey, file and archive paper evaluations. The University of Louisville saw an incredible savings of $100,000 in labor and resource costs after the first two years of using our Blue/Evaluations software.

2. Save time:

   By utilizing online course evaluations, your university can save time in a number of ways.

   • You don’t have to go through the process of process of printing, distributing, and collecting course evaluations.
   • If you have a system such Blue/Evaluations which fully integrates with most systems, this means that once setup is done, your demographic information is always there and doesn’t need to be re-entered subsequently thereafter.
   • This makes your surveys and course evaluations shorter, which leads to more enthusiastic participation from your students. Administrators can have much quicker access to reports of any type they desire.
3. More flexible surveys:

   When using an online course evaluation system, you are able to customize surveys to the specific needs of your institution, faculty or department. This gives you much greater flexibility in designing your questionnaires to accommodate faculty-level and course-level questions or to consider evaluations for different types of courses, including team-taught and cross-listed courses.

4. Easier IT support:

   Moving to an online evaluation system that fully integrates with your current IT infrastructure places less of a burden on your IT team. A patchwork of makeshift systems are replaced with an automated, centralized system, making support easier.

5. Future enhancements are easy to make:

   When you move to a comprehensive course evaluation software system such as Blue, it becomes easier to make changes when you need to update survey questions, create new report blocks or track trends.

Have you made the move to an online course evaluation system? What are some of the operational benefits you have experienced? Have you experienced any difficulties in this transition? Share with us!