Examining the Differences between Course Evaluation & Survey Software

Chalk this up as sort of a funny but insightful marketing story. Someone in our marketing department was examining leads that were coming in and trying to figure out where they were coming from, as he is prone to do. One particular contact request caught his attention. Someone had expressed an interest in our Blue/Surveys model. This in and of itself would not be noteworthy except for the fact that upon examining the traffic source behind the lead, it turned out that the keyword term that had brought the visitor to our site was in fact, “course evaluation software”.

This story raises a very poignant but rarely considered question: are there really any significant differences between the requirements for a course evaluation-specific system versus an automated survey system? Despite the fact that course evaluations and surveys seem very similar, comprehensive course evaluation systems have a number of distinguishing features that set them apart from surveys. Here are four of them.

1. Being able to add course-specific questions into the evaluation process:

   It’s one thing to be able to create questions. It’s another thing to be able to have the ability to add questions that are tied to a specific course, a specific instructor, or administrator.  This gives the ability to tailor your course evaluation to focus on whatever competencies or areas of focus you or other administrators wish to examine.

2. The ability to innately comprehend hierarchical relationships: 

   In any university environment, a professor has to deal with a department chairperson, faculty heads, provosts and many other hierarchical and non-hierarchical relationships. With this in mind, it is important to know who is asking what questions in order to make the course evaluation process a complete university-wide effort. This way, feedback & analysis gets dispersed throughout the university and it ensures that everyone with a decision making capability has an influence on making the type of changes that are necessary.

3. The ability to chart individual responses: 

   Given the sheer volume of students in a university as well as the number of courses, it becomes a very challenging task to keep track of which students have completed their course evaluations in specific courses.  A comprehensive course evaluation system should be able to track which courses certain students have reviewed, need to review, and which assessments should go to specific students.

4. The ability to track progress over time:

   As we have mentioned on occasion, course evaluations serve a developmental mission of not only improving course quality, but also evaluating a teacher’s progress on any number of criteria over time. Our Blue suite has the ability to not only build out comprehensive reports but also be able to seamlessly integrate into your student information system in order generate reports on an assortment of criterion stemming back from many years.

Have you ever used a survey system for your course evaluations? How did it work? Let us know.