Course Evaluation with EvaSys Education

Plumpton College is a specialised college offering land-based provision of further and higher education, ranging from Animal Care and Veterinary Nursing to Wine and Viticulture. Degree courses are provided in association with the University of Brighton. Situated at the foot of the South Downs close to Brighton it has approximately 1,500 learners.

Student feedback is at the heart of quality assurance in educational institutions but the implementation of a constant feedback system can prove difficult to achieve with limited resources. At Plumpton College, the Quality Management Department sought for a way to introduce capacity for online surveys, while at the same time achieving better reporting mechanisms for the data they collected each semester.

By implementing EvaSys in 2007, they achieved these aims while saving time on data input and analysis of results. Each semester, Plumpton College evaluates all courses. Although they specifically looked for a tool to conduct surveys online, both paper-based and online questionnaires are being used now.

Scannable questionnaires for different purposes have been designed. Questionnaires for Further Education provision are designed to comply with Ofsted and QAA requirements. Questionnaire content varies depending on course and age-level of students. Also, surveys are conducted at different stages within a course, such as during induction, while on programme and on exit of the programme.

The integrated questionnaire designer VividForms makes it easy to produce  questionnaires for different purposes by adapting a questionnaire accordingly. All questionnaires stored in the system can be used for both online and paper-based surveys and can be adapted easily.

The system is managed centrally by the Quality Systems Administrator (QSA). Course teams can choose to implement surveys for their courses either online or paper based for in-class administration. The choice between online or paper-based mode for each survey means that depending on the timing of the survey, the optimal mode to ensure high response rate can be adopted.

The QSA scans and processes all paper questionnaires upon return – then the data of both processed paper questionnaires and any online surveys are ready in the EvaSys database. Plumpton College uses the automatic e-mail function in EvaSys to disseminate instant PDF feedback reports to the teachers. This means teachers get feedback minutes after questionnaires have been scanned. Alongside the summary statistics the reports feature traffic light symbols which indicate for each question if a set target is met, putting the results into context.

The highly automated process is not only a world away from the laborious manual data inputting and analysing of each survey in Excel – it also helps with data aggregation, which was particularly time consuming before.

For heads of departments, summary reports are generated by the QSA. Quality guidelines summarise targets that should be reached on different dimensions. The objective to obtain trend data on different levels of aggregation – e.g., on course, departmental and college level – can now be achieved with little effort. This helps identifying trends and changes in perceived teaching quality.

Currently, 80 surveys per term for Further Education provision and the same amount for programmes in Higher Education per semester, are being conducted with EvaSys. Further plans are to use EvaSys  for other surveys within units across the college, such as Student Services, Business Training and for Customer Training.