How California State University improved course evaluations and faculty reviews
Survey responses jumped to 90%+ and retention rose to 68% with a combination of Watermark solutions.
Elizabeth Heise, Ph.D., Associate Vice President in the Office of Faculty Affairs at California State University Los Angeles, shares how her institution transformed course evaluations and faculty review processes with Watermark Faculty Success and Watermark Course Evaluations & Surveys. By replacing inefficient, manual systems with more intuitive tools, CSULA improved survey response rates, reduced administrative burden, and created a more streamlined, data-informed approach to faculty evaluation and development.
We worked with a tool that was very slow and didn’t offer us the flexibility we needed for Retention, Tenure, and Promotion (RTP). The user interface was not user-friendly (no copy paste — everything had to be manually typed in). The attachments had long load times (30-45 minutes in some cases) and in order to review joint appointments we had to run two parallel processes with the faculty member entering their information two times.
Our course evaluation system was very hard to work with as well. There were many hours of staff person time spent deploying the survey and processing the results. Again, not flexible and hard to use. Our students had a difficult time finding the survey and answering the questions. So our response rate was very low.
We started with Course Evaluations & Surveys (CES). We were able to implement the entire tool in a few weeks. Our first campus-wide course survey took the staff less than 30 minutes to deploy and the results took under 30 minutes to configure and distribute. Also our response rates shot up. Some of the classes had greater than 80% responses. We increased from single digits in most cases to an overall of 36% in our first cycle, with many now in the 80% range. The staff time saved has been amazing! It’s hard to measure but if you measure in smiles, there have been a lot of smiles! The feedback from the students has also been very positive.
We are currently piloting RTP using Faculty Success. So far faculty have found the platform to be intuitive. We have heard from reviewers that they are pleased with the custom report for the RTP dossier. They like the forms for the reviews. We continue to hear that this platform is better than the former tool.
Our Canvas team said that this was the easiest integration into Canvas that they have seen. They were impressed with the knowledge base resources and the quick responses from the implementation team. We already had Faculty Success in our college of business and economics. So part of the campus is not new to the platform but the RTP part is new. The majority of the campus is new to the platform and they are excited to see what it can do.
Since 2011, Watermark has helped us tell our story to AACSB. We are excited to expand that to the whole campus. Part of our implementation is using web profiles to tell our current and prospective students about our faculty members’ accomplishments. We plan on doing this once our RTP is kicked off and running! We also anticipate using Watermark for other accrediting agencies such as ABET.
The honest response is that the platform is very user friendly and intuitive. Your support team is amazing in their accommodation of our needs and responsiveness to our requests. I have used this tool since 2008 and the company has demonstrated continuous improvement. There are updates and new functionality every quarter. The company does not rest on past success. Watermark is a partner in your successful implementation. They stand shoulder to shoulder with you as you roll the product out to your campus. The people who work at Watermark are committed to understanding higher education and learning how technology can assist with the higher education enterprise. Most other vendors are focused on getting the contract executed and it is up to the university to figure out how to make it work for them.
