9 Best Practices for Migrating Your Course Evaluations Online (Continued)

In part one of this article, we identified 5 key practices that your college or university might want to identify in order to ensure the smoothest possible co-option of an online course evaluation software system into your environment.  We saved the 4 remaining best practices for part two, in part because of the level of detail involved. So here they are.

6. Be sure to select a course evaluation software system that is scalable for your growing student population: 

   Consider your typical university. Over 15,000 class sections with an average class size of 25.  To do all these course evaluations, you need to be evaluate 375,000 responses. If each student takes 4 or 5 courses… well you can do the math!

   A good system needs to be able to balance the load between different systems so as to avoid server overload but also be able to handle the demand across different cross sections of your student population at various periods.

7. Select an easy to use system:

   As people have become computer literate and more used to working on various portable devices, this is far less of an issue. But when you transition to an online system, it’s of paramount importance that the user interface, format and the directions are clear so that there’s no frustration in dealing with the new format.

8. Act quickly to show that you’re listening:

   When you transition to an online course evaluation system, it’s important to take steps to show that the first round of online evaluations were not for nothing.  If you act on the feedback that you first heard, and make it known that you have done so and why, this will go a long way to ensuring that your response rates progressively climb.

9. Be aware of your institutional environment: 

   It’s important to know the particularities of your university environment in order to know what sort of steps you need to take in implementing an online course evaluation system. Among the factors you need to consider include student trust, student awareness, accessibility issues,  the current system that’s in place, how prevalent a role IT plays in getting  system up and running, and much more.

So there you have it. 9 solid practices for migrating your course evaluations online. In our next post we will look at the benefits for bringing your course evaluations online, from an operational standpoint.