Online Course Evaluations

The UW is committed to reducing paper consumption by 30% from 2010 levels. As part of that effort, we are highlighting best practices on paper reduction from members of the UW community.

See our Paper reduction page for more information on reducing paper at UW and the UW Committee on Paper Reduction.

This snapshot is from the IASystem Developement & Management team.

With the increasing sophistication of online technology, colleges and universities have introduced a variety of web-based capabilities in their face-to-face courses and expanded the number and scope of their online course offerings. OEA has recognized the need for a more sophisticated and flexible course evaluation system to optimize the fit of the evaluative process with courses of all types. For the past 2.5 years, OEA has been working to create a new course evaluation system (IASystemTM) for use both at UW and at other post-secondary institutions across the country.

Our goal is to provide faculty the opportunity to choose the evaluation modality (online or paper-based) that best fits a particular course offering, while providing encouragement and support to transition as many courses to online evaluations as is consistent with superior pedagogical and assessment practice.

Redeveloping our existing course evaluation system to support both online and paper-based evaluations has required transitioning from a desk-top database (MS Access/Visual Basic) to an online environment (MySQL/Perl). We began defining our new database structure in 2011-12, pilot tested online survey delivery with courses in the iSchool and at UW Tacoma in 2012-2013, and evaluated all courses online in the Law School in 2012-13 while continuing the iSchool and UWT pilots and testing the online administrative interface. We released Version 1.0 of the new integrated system (IASystemTM) in Autumn 2013 and have begun training departmental coordinators at UW Seattle in the use of the online administrative interface. We have also begun working with faculty and departments to identify effective administrative practices to ensure high student response rates when evaluations are given online in face-to-face courses. During 2014-15 we will begin encouraging wider use of online evaluations in face-to-face courses with a goal of reaching steady-state adoption (~85%) within two years.