University College Stockholm Appoints Explorance to Course and Non-course Evaluation Surveys Brief

Montreal, Quebec – August 6, 2024 – University College Stockholm (UCS), one of the leading higher education institutions in Northern Europe in theology and human rights, has selected Explorance Blue as its course and non-course evaluations surveys provider. 

UCS, which has around 1,000 students on 265 courses running in four education cycles every year, was seeking a more streamlined approach to evaluations after previously undertaking manual administration and analysis. 

“Since I came to the University my role has been creating, assembling and generating course evaluation reports, and the responsibility to do evaluations for all courses took so much time,” said Course Administrator Bjørg Farstad. “In recent years, I have created surveys using Google forms, one for each course evaluation, and release them each term – and then I would generate one-to-one reports. I would produce and send these to our President, Heads of Department, Program Leaders and teachers, and doing so took weeks of my time. In addition, the reports that were generated could not be compared year on year. So it was very time consuming, with little output, and prone to error.” 

Bjørg first discovered Explorance five years ago and, having made the case for investment again last year, was successful in securing approval and started implementation this year. 

“I have wanted Explorance for a long time,” she revealed. “With Explorance Blue we saw what it could do for us, but it offered so much more than what the University needed when we first met. Recently the Swedish Council for Higher Education did an evaluation of the University, and made some recommendations around quality assurance, including our approach to course evaluations and other surveys. We knew that if we had Explorance we could deliver those. So it has been a long road to getting to where we are today, but we are delighted to be working with them now.” 

UCS is now looking forward to the difference that Blue will make when evaluations are rolled out in October. 

“The key benefits will be automation: one form, administered through Explorance, which we only need to go in and change if needed, that will save weeks and months of manual work; seeing results by program/department, and being able to compare these; and also looking at different trends across the University over time,” Bjørg commented. “Through Blue’s integration with Canvas, a key feature for us, we can set up reminders for students to complete our surveys if they have not already done so. With Blue reports will be developed and sent out to our hierarchy automatically. So many time savings, so much more efficiency all round.” 

She added: “Success going forward would be to show how our course evaluations are developing our time, increasing response rates and how we respond to the feedback, and having a compilation of data to demonstrate that.” 

As well as course evaluations, the University undertakes surveys with new students and Masters/PhD students, and would potentially like to extend these to include staff evaluation/self-evaluations and alumni relations.  

Head of Communication Bojana Bursać Džalto, who is responsible for non-course evaluations, said: “Explorance is something that was needed. Our evaluations connect to quality, but we also seek to understand values and options, so the idea of being able to compare is extremely important to show how these change over time. For example, with our one-time evaluation of new students, we need to present the data in a report. Currently this is done in Google forms and if we are looking to compare we have to do that manually in Excel. Having Explorance Blue means we now have a system that does this for us.” 

John Atherton, VP Sales EMEA at Explorance, explained: “Blue can be used for course evaluations, experience surveys, 360 degree feedback and more, and our collaboration with UCS shows how institutions can implement more and more of their surveys with us to reach the right people, with the right questions at the right time. We are pleased to be working with the University on this quality enhancement piece.”