Virtually every higher education institution has some form of student feedback process. This feedback is extremely beneficial to institutions because it gives them deeper insight into the student experience. However, for many institutions, the process of administering course evaluations needs fine-tuning to generate better results. The course evaluation process can be seamless, especially for Canvas higher education institutions.
There are three key areas of integration between course evaluations and Canvas — using data in course evaluation, increasing student response rates, and sharing results with faculty. Leveraging these three elements can help your institution efficiently and effectively collect course evaluations and analyze the results to empower improvements.
1. Data Integration
Data integration in course evaluation simplifies your access to evaluation results. Canvas already houses all your course, student, and instructor data, which makes it easier for your administrator to automate the flow of this data from Canvas into the course evaluation project, eliminating tedious and redundant work.
Enrollment refresh capabilities allow you to align Canvas enrollment updates with your course evaluation enrollments automatically. The resulting process is more accurate than manual data uploads and takes less time. Instead of waiting for results to be manually uploaded, you can access the course evaluation results in real time. Survey administrators can search for and select the courses that need evaluation from Canvas, import all the relevant data around those courses and enrollments, and schedule automated syncing.
Using data integration in course surveys gives you immediate access and allows you to make adjustments to courses and address student concerns as they arise. Rather than having a set time for evaluations, you can make course evaluation a constantly monitored factor in developing and delivering your courses. Data integration allows you to carry out pulse surveys to quickly adapt and make the necessary changes to give students what they need.
2. Driving Response Rates
Getting students to participate in surveys is critical to the success of your course evaluation process, yet it's an area institutions frequently cite as tricky at best. Higher response rates give institutions more meaningful results. A seamless Canvas interface that encourages student participation can significantly increase response rates to online surveys.
Within Canvas, we offer a variety of automated notifications and survey access points in strategic locations, as well as the option to make surveys mandatory. Together, these features make surveys more accessible to students, driving response rates and helping you gather the information crucial to informing improvements at your institution. Once students have completed their responses, the data flows directly into solutions, so trends and analysis are immediately available.
Rather than using a different platform for course evaluation, your institution can integrate surveys into the current system. This integration makes it easy for all students to access the surveys from anywhere, at any time. The system can also send notifications to remind students until they complete the survey.
Authorizing and customizing the evaluations in multiple languages helps deepen student engagement rates as they can communicate their answers in the most comfortable language.
3. Sharing Results
Our faculty interface within Canvas streamlines the delivery of results and analytics to faculty. Integrating course evaluations into faculty development makes it easier for faculty to access reports and insight without creating additional work. During the survey period, you can keep your faculty informed through integrated dashboards that show real-time response rates and highlight the number of days remaining in the survey window. Faculty can also receive notifications about their results and then seamlessly access a variety of course evaluation reporting and analytics tools directly within Canvas.
Once faculty receives the feedback, it's essential that they take action. They need to review the results and take steps to make necessary changes. If students complete evaluations, yet everything stays the same, they will soon lose interest in giving feedback.
Sharing results with faculty is essential for their personal growth and development. They can assess the overall trends to keep track of their goals and whether their teaching style and the changes they make positively impact their students.
Streamline Your Course Evaluations With Watermark
By leveraging these three essential areas of integration within Canvas — a turnkey data integration, seamless student experience, and streamlined faculty interface — institutions can get valuable student feedback into the hands of instructors faster and more effectively so that faculty can use it for planning and quality enhancement. These features help institutions mitigate the most challenging aspects of the course evaluation process and do so more efficiently than ever to drive meaningful change.
Watermark Course Evaluations & Surveys integrates easily into your systems, simplifying your course evaluation process. The software translates student responses into deep, actionable insights that faculty can use to enhance the teaching and learning experience. Integrating your systems makes surveys accessible to all students, helping to better your response rate and enabling you to convert feedback into results quickly. Simplify your course evaluation process by requesting a demo today!
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