Dear colleagues,

This is an update on course evaluations for fall semester 2020. While course evaluations were suspended for courses last spring, we intend to conduct evaluations for courses offered in fall semester 2020.

I understand that teaching this fall, for many of you, presented many new challenges. I also know that many of you spent time last summer preparing to teach in new modalities this fall. Because of the unprecedented instructional environment this fall, I believe it is as important for instructors to receive feedback from students on their teaching as it is for students to provide feedback on their learning experiences. The feedback you receive via course evaluations at the end of this semester will enable you to make changes and adapt your instruction for spring semester.

As announced in my communication dated September 17, course evaluations that previously were completed using the IAS forms (bubble sheets) will now take place electronically, using a program named Blue. UMOnline and a few academic units have used Blue in the past, and those units will continue to do so. The Office of the Provost is expanding the availability of Blue to all academic units that used IAS forms in the past. There has been some confusion on this issue, so to be clear, academic units that were not using either the IAS forms or Blue previously are not expected to transition to Blue at this time. Per CBA 10.230, "academic units shall either use an existing course evaluation form [such as the forms on Blue] or prepare and use their own evaluation form." In future years, the Office of the Provost will encourage SECs and FECs to consider course evaluations for fall 2020 within the broader context of COVID and our response to the pandemic.

Units that will use Blue forms this fall have been contacted by the Office of the Provost about this change. Faculty should work with the administrative associate who supports their academic unit to identify courses to be evaluated and the specific survey selected for evaluating each course. Each academic unit needs to submit information on the surveys they wish to use to Blue by Monday, Oct. 26.  The evaluation period will open on Nov. 9 and close Nov. 25.

Two training sessions for academic unit course evaluation managers were offered on Oct. 13 and 14. Recordings of those sessions are available here: session 1, session 2. We plan to offer additional training and information sessions for faculty and department chairs later in the semester. Please watch for email invitations to those. We are also working on updating the course evaluations webpage with this new information and plan to have those updates completed by the end of next week (Oct. 23).

Another advantage of the Blue evaluation system is that course evaluation summary data will be available to faculty and academic units much sooner than it was with the IAS forms. Faculty, department chairs, program directors, and others will be able to access summary data by the second week of December.

We encourage faculty members to provide background and context about course evaluations, explain the importance of these evaluations for improving instruction, and make students aware of the ways implicit bias can skew course evaluations prior to giving students access to course evaluations.

If you have general questions about course evaluations and the decision to conduct them this year, please contact Nathan Lindsay, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs. For specific questions about Blue, please contact Tom McClintock in the Office of the Provost. Thank you for your continuing adaptability as we work to implement this and other paperless processes on an accelerated timeline.

Sincerely,

Reed Humphrey, Acting Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs