Hear from your peer, Christopher

We had a process where every single department had different questions – a very legacy process from years ago. Watermark really made that process easy again. I, as a single person, can generally get all of our course evaluations for a term set up in half an hour. 

In our previous electronic system, we were getting about a 20 to 25% response rate. With Course Evaluations & Surveys, we are generally getting around 60% response rates and we’ve continued to see that rate be pretty steady over the years.

The biggest benefit for us in adopting this product was that we could get everything we needed for the integration with Canvas. From the time we started the integration, it was only about a day until we had everything done. It was just so simple.

It’s made it much easier for us to collect feedback and report on that feedback and help us make changes at the institution or at an individual department or course level, where needed. Compared to our previous products and previous processes around course evaluations (where we were spending days and weeks putting data together, analyzing it, getting it from multiple sources)  having Watermark has really simplified that process.

We’ve had a really good experience and very positive relationship working with Watermark over the years. The support has been very responsive. When we’ve had to create any tickets or ask questions, we’ve gotten quick replies. And we’ve gotten quick resolutions. Overall, we’ve been really happy with Watermark’s level of support. 

We’ve designed our course evaluations to really be aimed at faculty, letting them know things to maybe focus on the next time they teach. They can see this data immediately and see some things they didn’t realize aren’t working as well as they thought.

It also has really made the promotion and tenure process and annual review process much easier. People can go and get the data they need to put in their report, and that’s something we were just able to just turn on! Having the right reporting so we can see faculty members rank has been a huge thing for us.

Having the [survey] results be easily accessible is something our faculty have always asked us for. The faculty member can look at their feedback and work with our teaching and learning center to make changes to the course before they teach it the next time. So I think just having that data available in an easy-to-use form is key to kicking off all those other processes that will impact the student in the end.

In the end, I think one of the biggest benefits of Course Evaluations & Surveys has been the time savings and the ease as an administrator. Obviously, paper and pencil is a nightmare, and we had some of that before we went to Watermark.

When we implemented it, we had 16 different departments and 16 different surveys. So that meant there were 16 people that were spending days every term gathering results. Having me be able to do most of that work alone, and then release the results to those 16 people, we estimate weeks worth of time saved overall each term.

It really has been a perfect fit for us at Dearborn.