Course Evaluations

e-LIS oversees the course evaluation programs for the following academic areas:

Course Evaluation Information for Faculty:
School of Engineering-Faculty
School of Nursing-Faculty
School of Business-Faculty
General Evaluations-Faculty (School of Health Sciences, School of Education and Human Services and College of Arts and Sciences)

Course Evaluation Information for Students:
School of Engineering-Student
School of Nursing-Student
School of Business-Student
General Evaluations-Student (School of Health Sciences, School of Education and Human Services and College of Arts and Sciences)

The following strategies have all been employed by faculty who regularly receive a response rate of over 75%. While e-LIS does not advocate one strategy over another, we do recommend that you personally reach out to students, explain why course evaluations are important, and continually ask for their participation over several weeks. Do not solely rely on the automated emails, as these are often ignored by students.

• Faculty reminded students to complete their evaluations over several class periods.
• Faculty showed students a graph of how many students had completed their evals over time (several weeks).
• Faculty explained why completing course evals is important (they are used in faculty review and to improve courses and programs).
• Faculty set aside time in the last class session for students to use laptops and other technology for filling out their evals.
• Faculty made the evaluation part of a final assignment in Moodle - no credit was given, but students did it anyway out of habit.
• Faculty posted a prominent link to the course eval site in their Moodle course.
• The submission of the course evaluation was considered part of a general participation grade.
• Extra credit points were given to students who completed the evaluations.
• Extra credit points were given to the entire class when the total response rate crossed a specified percentage.
• Extra credit points were given to the entire class if the total response rate reached 100%.
• Other incentive (usually food) provided during the last class if a certain percentage of the class had responded by that date.

All course evaluation systems are anonymous, and no teacher ever has the ability to associate a specific set of responses to a specific student. Some systems, however, do allow the teacher to see the names of the students who have submitted evals, after a specific threshold has been crossed (usually, 5 students). This threshold exists to preserve student anonymity. While the teacher can see the student names, there is no way for the teacher to associate these to a specific set of responses, nor can they even see the responses until after final grades have been turned in. This functionality exists so that teachers who choose to use the extra credit incentive can see which students have completed the evaluation.