It’s never too early to prepare for end-of-course evaluations. The sooner you start, the more time you have to refine and improve your surveys and processes. These reminders will help you set up flawless evaluations.
Avoid Starting From Scratch
Copy last semester’s evaluation projects to save time on setup. Most standard settings (including communications, reporting setup, surveys, and project properties) can be turned into templates so you don’t need to start over each term. This can be especially helpful for longitudinal reporting — by using the same survey structure each semester, spotting trends over time is easy.
Sync Your Data
Our Course Evaluations & Surveys can seamlessly integrate with your LMS to help boost response rates and make it easy for you to pull key dates, course information, and user data into your evaluation project. Be sure to resync your data before importing courses for your new term so you’re working with the most recent information for your evaluations.
Mind the Calendar
Double-check that communications and other date-driven events correspond to each course's correct start and end dates. You don’t want students in a 16-week course to get their final evaluation midway through the semester, so if you have a variety of course lengths, set up dates at the course level. Project-level or fixed dates often work well if all courses follow the same timeline.
Review Your Project
Look through your communications and dates to ensure everything aligns with the current semester. Make sure that all courses are listed and aligned with the right hierarchy levels and that enrollment numbers are accurate. Remember to remind administrators and instructors to double-check that their custom questions are set up and ready to go.
Try Something New
If you've been making many changes on campus, now could be the right time to expand your surveys. If you plan ahead, you have ample time to adjust your evaluations and try something new. Consider:
- Allowing instructors or administrators to create custom questions.
- Creating targeted surveys that include specific questions for colleges or departments.
- Sending general surveys to gather feedback beyond the classroom for anything from campus parking to your institution’s COVID response.
Tips for Creating Course Evaluations
Whether creating new course evaluations or refreshing your current ones, knowing how to create effective surveys can be challenging. To help you get a head start on course evaluations, consider these tips:
1. Add Intentional Questions
Adding intentional questions makes the responses much more valuable. Have a goal in mind to base questions on. For example, if you're trying to determine if certain course materials were effective, you may ask students if they found them helpful. Intentional questions also help keep the evaluation focused so each question has a purpose that helps you meet a goal.
Intentional questions also elicit intentional responses. The more thought you put into your questions, the more thought you'll get in the answers.
2. Be Clear and Specific
While you may use a few general questions that could apply to most courses, the more specific your questions are, the better. Vague, general questions are more difficult to answer, so the responses will be less helpful for implementing change. Be clear and specific when writing evaluation questions to get more straightforward answers and higher engagement.
For example, rather than asking if students generally liked or disliked a course, ask if they think a specific textbook should be used again and why. Questions like this provide more useful insights to inspire future course improvements.
3. Use Different Question Formats
Use a combination of open-ended, short-response, and rating-scale questions to elicit the most comprehensive feedback possible. Varying the question format helps make your evaluations more engaging and can increase the feedback you receive.
For example, asking only rating-scale questions may not give you in-depth insights — alternatively, participants may feel less inclined to complete the evaluation if they have to freewrite all their answers. Using different question formats in your evaluation also diversifies the data you collect.
4. Make It Short
Keep your evaluations short to increase the likelihood that more students complete them. Students are busy individuals, especially at the end of the semester. Between studying for finals and completing evaluations for each of their courses, students value the convenience of brief evaluations. The longer the survey is, the more likely you'll get a lot of random answers just so students can “finish” it.
Encourage faculty to give students time to complete these evaluations in class to increase the response rates.
Prepare for Course Evaluations With Watermark
Save yourself time at the end of the term by planning ahead with Watermark. Digital course evaluation platforms like Watermark simplify course evaluation preparation. Our Course Evaluations & Surveys solution makes collecting student feedback easy. Enjoy features that give you control over when and where evaluations are sent out, leverage responses into actionable insights to drive improvement for student success, and allow you to repeat evaluations from term to term easily.
Request a demo to see how Watermark Course Evaluations & Surveys can benefit your institution.
