Best Practices for Improving Online Evaluation Response Rates

Dear Faculty Member, here is some general information regarding online evaluations and some best practice tips to improve response rates:

1. Course and Instructor evaluations must be completed before finals week, to avoid the possibility of student bias.
2. Evaluations cannot be sent out too early in the semester but rather near the semester’s end. These are sent from Enterprise Computing via an email to all students currently enrolled in your course(s). A course must have more than4 students for an evaluation to be generated. The length of the evaluation period is based on the length of the Part of Term (POT):

   Length of POT	Evaluation Length
   Less than 30 days	3 days
   31 - 50 days	5 days
   51 - 80 days	7 days
   More than 80 days	15 days

3. Prior to the notification, explain to your students the value of their input and give an example of how the evaluations have impacted and/or changed elements within your course.
4. Identifying students that have completed the evaluation and who has not is information that is not shared with the lead instructor and other instructors assigned to the course.
5. Information on overall completion rates can be requested from Enterprise Computing during the open-access period to target a completion rate. The percentage completion is also available through the faculty & instructor tab in the https://my.utep.edu/Faculty
6. Offer a small incentive for a designated class response rate i.e. 10 points added to a quiz grade.
7. Set aside time during your class for the students for evaluations. It’s best to leave the classroom to allow the students to complete the evaluation to maintain anonymity.
8. Send a follow up email thanking the students for completing the evaluation and how their input might affect course design and/or requirements.
9. The biggest reason that students do not fill complete course and/or instructor evaluations is because they don’t believe that faculty will act on their input!

Click here to see the PDF file for the Best Practices for Improving Online Evaluation Response Rates