Where do I start?
There are a number of tasks to do before you can start evaluating course sections. The following information needs to be customized:
- Organizational Unit Chart
- The organizational unit chart is the backbone of your Course Evaluations platform. The unit chart functions to allow certain courses and sections be stored at the appropriate level, but also provides report administrators the ability to see the results of a particular group of courses from their area.
- Name Organizational Unit Levels
- Organizational Unit Levels provide nomenclature to your organization's unit chart (see below). Examples of levels often defined are: College, Department, or Program.
- Create Course Section Attributes
- Attributes are characteristics that you can assign to courses and sections in your Course Evaluations platform. Courses may have as many attributes as you deem necessary. This information can only be assigned via import. Attributes can help identify the delivery method of the course, the type of course, or the level. Custom questions can also be applied to specific attributes.
- The attribute identifies information about the course such as the type (Lab, Lecture, Online), the time in which the course is assessed, or the location of the course. Attributes can be used for question assignment and for reporting.
- Assign Instructor Roles
- Instructor Roles are items that allow you to identify the instructor's role in the course. Questions on your evaluation are then assigned by role so that a different set of questions may be asked about a Primary Instructor than the Teaching Assistant. Instructor roles are identified through the import process to support a user having different roles per course section.
- Create User Roles
- A User Role identifies what the role(s) of a user are on campus. Typically used to identify Full Time Faculty, Part Time Faculty. There are two types of roles--Faculty Roles and Report Administrator Roles.
- Build your course evaluation
- Create Mailing Templates
- Mailing templates are pre-created emails that you can use when setting up your administrations. The pre-created templates are customized per institution, and alleviate having to re-type the email message each time you administer an evaluation. These templates can be messages to send to students or faculty.
- Add an Academic Term or a Part of Term
- The term is the overarching time period within which you may run administrations, while a Part of Term is a smaller increment with. The term dates should match the dates of your institutional term dates. The term drop down also plays an important role in your ability to toggle through results based on the term in the reporting area.
- Allow list the Course Evaluations IP Address and Email Address/Domain, so emails from the system do not go to spam/junk folders on campus. Please contact our Support team for more information.
- Make the important decisions about thresholds, student identifiers, and student completion notations.
- Would you like to enable the response threshold?
- Thresholds - A global threshold feature can be enabled in the system to allow for restricting instructors access to reports if their section does not meet three (3) or more responses - or - 100% response rate. If the threshold is not met, the reports will not be released to instructors, but administrators will still be able to view the results within the student response export.
- Would you like the ability for faculty to identify student completion?
- Student Completion Notations - Course Evaluations administrators have the ability to export a file noting which students have or have not completed their evaluations. A setting can also be enabled to allow faculty to see this information; results are not released to the faculty member, but rather a notification that the student has completed the evaluation for that course.
- Would you like student identifiers to appear on the student response export?
- Student Identifiers - Course Evaluations administrators have the ability to export the student responses (raw data) per term per evaluation. In that raw data file each respondent can be identified. These identifiers are disabled by default.
Much of this information will be completed with the help of your Anthology specialist, but all of these may be completed by the campus administrator as well.
Additionally, it is likely that you will not need to edit many of the items above for the entire duration of your Course Evaluations license. This information is generally standard for a number of years at a majority of institutions. Once it is set in the site, you will most likely not need to revisit it. Academic Terms, however, are added at the beginning of each term.
Once these items are completed, you are ready to move on to Step 2: The Administration Process!