Course Evaluation with EvaSys Education

The Institute of Technology at North Rhine-Westphalia, Aachen, Germany or RWTH, opened in 1870. Today  RWTH offers 30,000 students a wide range of courses in natural sciences and engineering as well as economics, humanities and medicine, altogether providing 85 courses in 9 faculties.

The first course evaluation conducted with the EvaSys software at the RWTH took place during a pilot project surveying 3,800 students. This survey pilot was administered at the faculty of mathematics, computer and natural sciences in the summer semester of 2003 .

To date, all faculties have conducted one comprehensive course evaluation per semester; the current number of questionnaires in EvaSys adds up to 35,000 per semester. Before EvaSys was introduced, no structured or regular course evaluations were conducted at the RWTH. Course surveys were conducted individually: either at the student’s initiative or at an instructor’s request, each with differing methodology and goals.

“For centrally coordinated, university wide surveying of  students, we required a software suite that could efficiently conduct and analyse mass course evaluations” explained  Ms Thaler of RWTH Aachen. Out of all the available  providers, EvaSys was chosen as the most consistent software solution.

Surveys conducted at the RWTH Aachen are primarily paper-based, however occasionally they are conducted online, depending on the lecturer’s preference. The coordination of evaluations is carried out centrally.

The procedure for the course evaluation is as follows: Based on data from CAMPUS, RWTH Aachen’s electronic lecture directory , each tutor receives a list of his lectures and seminars for the relevant semester, whereby they can mark or complete the list to include lectures they wish to be evaluated. After this, each tutor is entered into the same software which analyses the questionnaires. By means of an automatically generated e-mail lecturers can follow a link which enables them to integrate individual questions into the standardised university questionnaire. Once completed, the questionnaires are again made available to the lecturers via an automated e-mail. The standardised questionnaires are created with an integrated design module for the different types of courses.

The students fill out the forms during their lectures. The completed questionnaires are then sent back to the coordination office, where they are scanned using a high performance scanner. Implementing the verifier module, which offers an integrated reading module as well as visual inspection, the sheets are captured and verified. The collected data is then statistically analysed and put into graphs. Subsequently the automatically generated analysis reports are sent by EvaSys directly to the lecturer. At faculty level the data is individually processed, e.g. in Excel or SPSS. The results of the surveys provide department heads with valuable indicators and ratings for courses from the students point of view. Moreover, important and clear trends can be derived from the results, facilitating rapid quality improvements in the teaching sector. Ms Thaler explained that “EvaSys serves us as a quality assurance instrument and delivers initial indicators of strengths and weaknesses”.

In addition, EvaSys offers the ability to calculate mean cumulative grades and statistical averages of all courses from various departments. These cumulative, anonymous and aggregate evaluations can be published on the Internet, so as to enable comparisons between different courses, and to indirectly drive lecturers to improve.

For other projects, e.g. module evaluation in dental medicine, individual adaptation and construction of questionnaires is made simple with the user friendly VividForms editor, which is integrated into EvaSys.