SMARTEVALS (FCE) FACULTY COURSE EVALUATIONS GUIDE

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1 Faculty Course Evaluations (FCEs) are used to improve the quality of teaching and learning at Carnegie Mellon through feedback to both individual faculty members and promotion committees. Responses to the FCE provide information on students' perceptions of their engagement, learning outcomes, the instructor's behavior and course activities. This feedback will help guide changes in future iterations of the course and/or the instructor's teaching. Responses also serve as one measure of the quality of faculty member's teaching that is used to evaluate faculty for promotion and tenure. Faculty Senate and the University Education Council establish and vote on the actual course evaluation questions and retention of the faculty course evaluation. The University Registrar s Office administers the faculty course evaluation gathering all the required FCE course sections. We partner with Gap Technologies and their software application, SmartEvals, to administer the course evaluations. Gap Technologies have met specific privacy and security standards in compliance with the Carnegie Mellon Information Security Office and with Computing Services. The university takes your privacy seriously, and all reasonable precautions to protect it have been taken. Please direct any questions or concerns about this issue to uro fce@andrew.cmu.edu. Effective Fall 2017, the myevalcenter changed to an SECTION 508 compliant view. This view provides a better graphic of information for the instructor. When an instructor logs into the site using their AndrewID and password, the following view appears. On the top right is the menu bar. Handouts >> To ensure high FCE response rates, you can ask your class to scan this QR code into their cell phones and complete their evaluations. This QR code will require the student to type in their login id to the SmartEvals.com system but not their password. QR codes are more secure than a typical paper based faculty course evaluation. This code can be set to be used for 30 minutes after the first student scans the code. We recommend you tell your students the class before to bring their cell phones with a QR reader app. University Registrar s Office Page 1 of 7 26 November 2017

2 Edit >> Reports >> Thank you notes: Use this box to leave a thank you to your students for completing your evaluation. This message will be shown after they complete the evaluation. To the right you can upload an image that will be shown with your message to students. Instructors who acknowledge student feedback get higher quality data. students: Increase your response rates by ing your students. can be sent automatically or a shout to all of your courses. Note: SmartEvals administration will send s every 3 days during the course evaluation period. Upload a picture<optional>: Your image file must be smaller than 90kb, in JPG or PNG format, and, ideally, 100px by 100px. Once you upload your picture here, it will be displayed to your students on their evaluations. By including your picture, your students will be better able to identify which class they are evaluating and are more likely to provide feedback. Historical Reporting: This screen will display the instructors historical reporting for all course sections as far back as Fall By choosing the bar graph located by each course, this will display a custom report. Refer to the Results Ready for Viewing section for further information. School Wide Results >> School Wide Results will display scores only for all courses participating in the FCE across all colleges and schools. The default page will display the Carnegie Institute of Technology/ All Departments. These results are viewable by staff and students. Comments are not displayed for school wide results. University Registrar s Office Page 2 of 7 26 November 2017

3 This page provides various selection dropdowns if you wish to explore results across the university by specific semester, college, department or instructor. Students and staff use this screen to view results for course selection or tenure promotions. Open Surveys Section During a course evaluation deployment period, your course(s) will display under the open course evaluations section. Each course and section has their own tile that will display the Course evaluation begin date, end date, when results will be released and response rate. Instructors can see their response rate during the course evaluation deployment period. Instructors can get a QR code to display during class time for students to scan with their mobile device that will invoke the course evaluation tool. This code will expire after two hours but students can still evaluate the course outside of class. Instructors can students with their own message. SmartEvals will students every 3 days automatically. But sending a reminder directly from the instructor improves response rates. Note: for team taught courses can only have one faculty member sending . University Registrar s Office Page 3 of 7 26 November 2017

4 Instructors can also preview the course evaluation course evaluation itself in case they have any questions. Instructors cannot add any additional questions. This feature was not passed by Faculty Senate. What do STUDENTS see during the course evaluation deployment period? The new course evaluation tool is SECTION 508 compliant. The course evaluation can be delivered to any computing device such as mobile phone, tablets and computers. When students login, they will see a complete your course evaluation page. When students opt to complete their course evaluation, the ten question evaluation will load and display in tiles. Comments can be written in the last tile. A blue submit button is prevalent. If a student fails to click the submit button, the data is stored during the deployment period. The student will be reminded that the course evaluation is not complete and can return to the evaluation. Once the deployment ends and the student does not finish, this data is lost. University Registrar s Office Page 4 of 7 26 November 2017

5 When a student completes the course evaluation, it will list that the course was completed. Once the courses evaluation period closes, students will see a pages that states there are no course evaluations to take. University Registrar s Office Page 5 of 7 26 November 2017

6 Results Ready for Viewing Section Semester FCE results are calculated and released a few days after the final grade deadline ensuring that all participating campuses have submitted final grades. Results are sent via to each participating faculty as a pdf attachment generated by the SmartEvals system. These results provide the average score per question, possibly a graph and comments. Faculty should check their for any s with attachments coming from the SmartEvals system. Past results will appear under the Results Ready for Viewing. Data displays the semester, course, section, deployment dates, final response rate and see Reports option. See Reports will display the following information. The Comments tab will display student comments. University Registrar s Office Page 6 of 7 26 November 2017

7 Individual Evaluations tab will display what every respondent answered for each the question. Questions? Please inquire to uro or Joy Cavaliero, Senior Associate Director at University Registrar s Office Page 7 of 7 26 November 2017