This page contains a synopsis of information presented on 2/29/2008 to members of the faculty by vendors from two different companies who provide services for doing course evaluations. These are just the quick notes that I created. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

On-line Course Evaluations

This is a company that provides software and hosting for doing course evaluations on-line. Note that this solution is on-line only. In the presentation we were walked through a demonstration of their software. You can can to this same demonstration by going to the following web site and using the listed e-mail and password.

demo.onlinecourseevaluations.com (e-mail: demo@trinity.edu, password: inspire)

Some of the highlights of this system include the following:

• Has the ability to do follow-up questions. This is where more questions are asked based on results of original questions.
• Students can't use the back button after they submit the form.
• They have the ability to do different question sets and give a different look for the forms.
• It can handle questions for separate profs in team taught courses and the results of those questions only go to the faculty member they are relevant to.
• They have the ability to ask questions of students who have dropped or withdrawn from courses.
• The demo forms allow you to submit without filling in all bubbles, but that can be prevented.
• There are all types of stats displays that can be shown for any of the departments, faculty, etc. Of course, questions that are presented with a non-scale response won't have stats and will just be summarized in the response displays.
• It compiles the comments into a separate display.
• There is also a view where you basically see each “form” from each student listing their numeric responses to questions as well as their comments.
• They have a “longitudinal” report that shows change over time.

Scantron Class Climate

This is a product sold by the Scantron company that provides paper and on-line questionnaires. The software allows for building the forms that will either be printed on our laser printers or put on-line. The same form can be administered both ways if need be. Here is their web page on the product.

Here are some of the points that I noted during the presentation.

• There are about 320 installation running across the country. They can link to Datatel, Blackboard, etc.
• They can put the forms into PDF that can be printed on any laser printer. The key highlight of this system is that any survey can be done in either paper or on-line format.
• Keeps a library of questions. You can add your own questions to that library.
• Has the ability to determine if text was written in open questions and only keep those.
• We would have the ability to save off the “standard” questions and then everyone would be able to add extra questions.
• There are different levels of security access so that some people could only do scanning, but couldn't see reports.
• They have the ability to send out reminder e-mails at regular intervals. It can also print out pass codes for students that can be distributed to them. They are also working on notifications that go through something like Blackboard instead of sending out the e-mails.
• It has a report generator so that new types of reports can be generated. You can also get back to the original data that was entered in a format that can be used with a program like Excel.
• Comparison reports can be made over time or against different groups.
• The optical scanners put comments that have been scanned in and groups them together on the form. This will get non-text elements of student responses. They have a feature called the Anonymizer that will allow someone not connected with the class to key in responses so that handwriting can't be recognized. The Administrator has the ability to delete comments that are inappropriate if a school allows that.
• The system will also allow general surveys for whatever purposes, including elections.
• They support multi-surveys where you basically have multiple surveys on a single form.