9 Best Practices For Migrating Your Course Evaluations Online

If you’ve decided to migrate your teaching assessment and course evaluation process online, or are at least giving it some thought, there are some tactics you need to implement to ensure a smooth and successful transition.

To best do this, you need to be aware of some of the best practices that your institution can undertake in order to ensure that this transition is met with the least amount of resistance as possible.  Here are some things to consider if you’re even thinking of migrating your course or program evaluations to an online system.

1. Clearly communicate the intention to transition and the benefits of this transition: 

   This is absolutely crucial. In order to ensure that those who have gotten used to doing things on paper are reassured that things will not become overly complicated when switching to a web-based course evaluation system. Press releases, public service announcements, posters around campus and email campaigns should be undertaken in order to continue to assuage people that an orderly plan has been undertaken in order to ensure a smooth transition as possible.

2. Ensure that confidentiality will not be compromised in the transition: 

   This is especially true in a university or college environment. Online evaluations and surveys must remain secure and confidential so as to assure students that their honest feedback is valued and that what they disclose will in fact help to improve courses (and over time the overall quality of education at your institution). It’s imperative that no instructor is ever able to identify a specific student’s comments or feedback.  It’s pretty self explanatory.

3. Move to an online system in stages:

   Moving to an online course evaluation software system in increments can be very beneficial. There are a number of ways to do this. You can have some departments in your institution do online evaluations to start and have the remaining continue to use paper. You can have everyone transition to an online system by a certain date. Other options include sending students to a centralized computer lab, or having course evaluations emailed to students so that they can do them on their laptops, tablets or PCs at their convenience.

4. Use your student portal to communicate the benefits of an online course evaluation system:

   Portal integration can be a great way to encourage the use of course evaluations through a number of means. First of all, you can use the portal to embed your course evaluations so as to facilitate reach and increase participation, both through access and via reminders.  At a more extreme level, grade blocking, where students cannot access their grades until all their course evaluations are completed, is also an option.  Of course, grade blocking is something that needs to be considered carefully in order to make sure that other avenues have been exhausted beforehand before this alternative is considered.

5. Provide a small incentive: 

   Among possible options include offering a fraction of a percentage point grade uplift as a way to get students to complete their evaluations.

In our next post we will communicate our 4 remaining recommendations to help your institution transition from paper course evaluation surveys to a web based course evaluation system. So stay tuned.

Have you utilized any of the above tactics? Did they help in your transition? Share with us!