How to Create a Continuous Course Evaluation

If you and your colleagues hold courses regularly, you might benefit from using the very same Quest for all your course evaluations. The main perks of keeping the same Quest for a given purpose is:

  1. Direct access to aggregated results
  2. Consistent reporting with reusable Reports and LiveReports
  3. Streamlined information flow with reusable Notifications
  4. Tidy folders

A basic example can be a Company Z that offers two separate courses (A and B), held by four separate course leaders. The course content may vary with the given course holder and across the two separate courses, but “Company” wants to be able to monitor how all course participants evaluate their attendance.

Step 1 is creating the Quest and Question sets. In this guide, we will drop the Question “Which course did you attend?” in favour of stating it in the respondent data, together with “Course date”, “Course leader name” and “Course leader email”:

  1. Was the level of the course in line with your prior knowledge?
  2. The course in general
  3. The course leader in general
  4. Administration and facilities
  5. Do you have any suggestions for improvements, or any other questions or comments?

 

Respondent data

  1. Course type (The two courses A and B)
  2. Course date (20 separate, and counting) *
  3. Course leader name (The five separate course leaders)
  4. Course leader email

Save the Excel sheet as a csv-file to avoid formatting of the course dates column in the excel-file.

Step 2 is importing the Respondent data file. This is added via Distribution, Add invitees and Import file

Part 2: Notifications

Each individual course holder should be able to read new responses from participants on their courses, as they come in. Make sure to add the Course leader email as recipient of the notification. In this way, the same notification is used, but the recipient varies with which respondent that answered. Navigate to Notifications in order to create it:

  • Add the Trigger for the notification, in this case we select Question 1 and select Answered, in other words the notification will trigger if Question 1 is answered:

In the Drop-Down menu called To, select Recipient specified in respondent data, followed by selecting Course Leader email in the Respondent data field drop-down menu:

 

Next, tailor the notification body with relevant information using “Insert tag”, “Insert Q&A tags” and “Insert receipt”:

Other useful notifications to add may include:

  • A notification directed to the manager of the course leaders whenever respondents give high or low remarks for a given “Course Leader”
  • A notification to the responsible person/function whenever respondents give low remarks on facilities/food and drinks/etc.
  • A notification to the respondent with regards for giving feedback, a tailored copy of response, relevant information on future courses
  • Other, more specific notifications for your organization or type of courses?

Part 3: Reporting

In order to group respondents based on which type of course they attended, the course leader or the date, you will need single-condition value filters. You may create new filters for all available respondent data from the Filters pane:

These filters will then be made available for selection in your reports from “Report Settings”:

As you have feedback from course participants across various courses, held by separate course leaders on a range of course dates – you have both easy access to aggregated results and the possibility of breaking down these results by specific criteria, by enabling the specific filters to single out groups of respondents:

  • The example from the picture above will enable LiveReport viewers (readers) to read both the full report, and filter it based on based on the respondent data variables. See example of a tailored “Course Evaluation – Main report” here
  • It might also be useful to see how this data breaks down with batch-comparisons across “Course Type”. See example here
  • … or by adding one comparison per individual “Course Leader” (see example here).
  • If only disclosing feedback on courses to the respective “Course Leader’s” is desired (and not sharing other course leader’s results with others) – you may batch-copy a report per “Course Leader”. See example of batch copied report here
  • If you continue using the same “Course evaluation” Quest over several years, apply interval filters to single out respondents for given months and years. Remember to update the references to calendar years across the “Quest name”, “invitations”, “reminders” and reports

Part 4. Using your Course Evaluation Quest

When you have completed all above-mentioned parts and associated steps, your course evaluation will be ready for publishing. Apply relevant tags (as with notifications) to create tailored invitation messages, and consider adding interval reminders to increase your response rate.

If participants join several courses, it’s important to allow duplicates when importing the invitees.

If the any need for modifications to your Quest arise, it may be useful to note what can- and cannot be done in a published Quest.
You may:

  • Add new questions or new question alternates
  • Hide questions or question alternatives
  • Add routing conditions to existing Quests
  • Edit text on questions or question alternatives

You may not:

  • Change Question Types of existing questions
  • Delete Questions or Question Alternatives

Note: You may also automate invitations (Step 2.) to your Course Evaluation with file integration.
Learn more about our integration options in Essential here, and see the documentation for our ESS Integration Utillity here

academy

About Academy

Did you find an answer to your question? Under documentation we have gathered informative descriptions that helps you understand Essential's functionality fully. Through insight work, you raise the level of knowledge in the entire organization