Comparative quality assurance with the EvaSys software solution

The Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg (HSU HH) is one of two universities in Germany in which the Federal Armed Forces have established the academic education of officers. Founded in 1973, the university encompasses the four faculties of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Humanities and Social Sciences as well as Economics and Social Sciences.

Short standard periods of study, a tried and tested Small Unit Concept and outstanding mentoring relationships are some of the distinctions of the HSU HH. The study courses offered to the 2.000 students are balanced between scientific and practical studies.

Conducting central teaching evaluation was established at the HSU HH in 2001 by the university controlling department. The questionnaires were originally created with MS Word, evaluation was then completed with SPSS. In spite of the high time and personnel effort involved, it was only possible to poll about 250 students. This did not come close to reaching the desired extent of the conceptual planning.

Since 2003, the HSU HH has been creating their evaluations with the EvaSys system from Electric Paper. EvaSys satisfied the university as a consistent soft-ware solution, accommodating all the demands on an evaluation program in one system.

As opposed to other suppliers, who mix stand-alone products and different software packages together, EvaSys has the different modules, e.g. generation of surveys or automated dispatch, already integrated. With EvaSys you not only create questionnaires but collect data quickly and simply. With the help of a high performance scanner, completed sheets can be digitized and saved at a rate of 40 pages per minute. Thanks to the intelligent reading mechanism of the document readers the chance of errors is reduced to a minimum, delivering a higher quality than manual data entry. EvaSys processes the collected data and immediately sends automatically generated PDF reports, showing the proc-essed data in a graphical format, via e-mail to the evaluating teaching staff.

At the HSU HH the questionnaires for the paper based surveys are created at a central office. The HILVE2 questionnaire from Dr. Heiner Rindermann, University of Magdeburg, well known in German speaking areas, is used for course evaluation.

The additional HILVE2 module for EvaSys comprises of questionnaires, an index data pool and advisory texts for interpretation. The index data pool brings together the evaluation results of different universities and faculties over sev-eral years. In this way, HILVE2 users can compare their data with that of other universities and faculties in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Since implementing EvaSys at the HSU HH, the time and personnel expenditure has been reduced considerably. It used to be a full time job with an expendi-ture of time of up to 50% for the processing of the evaluation procedure, today it is only 10% - and that’s with a quadrupled number of questionnaires. “Now we can ensure the cyclical implementation of evaluation over a wide area”, says Bernd Schlömer, who is responsible for the introduction of the system, and “there are still reserves to be developed”.

At present, the HSU HH also uses EvaSys for single empirical evaluations by which, depending on the project, up to 12.000 form pages are processed. The questionnaires for this are created by Mr Schlömer with the integrated ques-tionnaire designer.