Experience with the College-Wide Transition from Paper to On-line Course Evaluations

In 2006, the college made a transition from the use of paper to on-line course evaluations. The reasons for this change related to confidentiality, flexibility in questionnaire content, the ability to evaluate different types of courses and costs. Since questions were raised by faculty about the consequences of an expected reduction in the response rate and the number and length of responses to open-ended questions, a careful study of the transition was made and is reported here. While the response rated did drop as expected, little evidence can be found to support the hypothesis that it has a significant effect on overall averages of student responses as long as the response rate is above a commonly achieved threshold. There remain, however, several concerns. These include a recently declining response rate and concern over the number of smaller courses with unreliable data due to less than the minimum number of student responses. Nevertheless, overall experience has been positive and the transition has been mostly successful.