Information for Online Course Evaluations

Online summaries of the instructor evaluations (and evaluations from previous semesters going back to fall 2006) are available for you to view online (instructions for online access are included below). Instructor evaluation access is provided through the College¹s online portal eCommon. Please let the Office of Academic Affairs know if you notice any irregularities in the evaluations by sending an e-mail to academic_affairs@emerson.edu.

Access evaluation summaries on eCommon.

1. When the "Login" page appears, enter you ECnet username and password in the appropriate boxes and click the "Login" button. This will take you to the eCommon home page. If you have problems logging in you'll need to contact the Emerson College Help Desk at helpdesk@emerson.edu or 617-824-8080. Access to eCommon is provided by the information technology department and there is nothing that Academic Affairs can do to solve a problem associated with eCommon portal access.
2. Depending on your particular role at the college you should see a number of tabs near the top of the page. Make sure you are on the Faculty tab or click on that tab if you are not.
3. From the Faculty page tab, look to the set of channels (each in its own box-like frame) and you should see a channel labeled Faculty Tools. Click on the Course Evaluations link and a new browser window or browser tab will open.
4. Once the "Term Options" page appears, select the term you want to review from the drop-down list and click the "Review Evaluations" button.
   Note: If you are looking to access specific term evaluations you need to select the appropriate term from the list.
5. A page containing a list of the courses with evaluations for the selected term organized by course code will appear (this may take a few moments depending on the number of courses you have access to); clicking on a course will bring you to the summary of student responses for that course (see details below under Summary of Instructor Evaluations).
6. If you have comments or questions, click the "Feedback" link on the left side of the page to send an e-mail to Academic Affairs.
7. If you want to review another course, click the "Another Course" button (return to step 5)
8. If you want to review courses for another term, click the "Another Term" button (return to step 4)
9. When you are done, close the browser window or tab.

Summary of Instructor Evaluations

For each course you will be directed to a new page presenting the summary statistics for that course including:

• The course code, Title & Instructor(s) for the course as well as the response rate among students enrolled in the class.
• A Demographic section indicating basic information about the students who completed the evaluations including: Class Standing, Enrollment Type (full/part time), Majors, and Gender.

For most courses the display will follow the outline presented below. There is an exception in the case of non-tuition courses which will be explained in the appropriate section at the end of this e-mail.

The instructor evaluation will present information for items 1 through 10 from the current survey. For each item, students were asked to choose one response between the range of extremes (e.g. Very Organized to Not Organized) reflecting their experiences with the course and instructor. Each item is presented with a breakdown of the percentage of students who indicated each response choice above the number of students indicating each response (in parentheses) accompanied by item means and standard deviations. For courses with more than one instructor, students were asked to rate each instructor separately and only ratings specific to you will be summarized in your display.

Written Comments

Responses to open-ended items are collected here under the appropriate headings as submitted by students completing the survey. Spelling, grammar, wording, etc. have not been altered or changed in any way. Responses are presented as they were entered by each student for aspects students found most beneficial (item 11), suggestions for instruction enhancement (item 12), and general comments regarding student experiences with the instructor (item 13). A final item asking students to indicate any additional comments about the course (item 14) is presented at the end of the evaluation summary.

Note: Students were asked to comment on each instructor separately for multiple instructor courses. We have provided a separate instructor comments section devoted to written comments specific to each instructor assigned to the course for multi-instructor course sections.

When you've completed reviewing a course you may return to the menu of available courses by selecting the “Another Course” button or may logout of the course evaluation access page by simply closing the browser tab or window.

Evaluations Extract Process for Faculty

We have included a feature for the online interface that allows instructors to receive a copy of their raw data via e-mail if they would like to do so. Following the instructions below will deliver a tab delimited text file of the raw data for an individual course to the recipients e-mail address.

• At the bottom of the Course and Teacher Evaluation Survey Summary web page you will find the message: “To extract these evaluations into a tab-delimited text file and email the file to you for loading into a spreadsheet (like Excel), enter your email address here:” followed by a text box where you can enter the email address you want to receive the evaluation responses for the course. A copy of the survey items can also be delivered in a separate file by selecting the subsequent check box.
• Change the destination email address if you wish, select the check box if you want a copy of the evaluation questions that correspond to the responses being extracted, and then click the “Extract and Email” button.
• The evaluation responses for this course will then be extracted into a text file and emailed to the address you specified. If you opted to have the questions emailed to you, they will be sent in a second message. A confirmation page will be displayed with the term, course code and email address.
• The message(s) should arrive in your email client within a few seconds.

To load the responses data into Excel:

• open the email message titled “Course evaluation responses for <course code> in <term>;”
• open the attached text file and save it (to your desktop in Windows would be easiest);
• open Excel and use the "Open" option to read the saved text file;
• in the "Text Import Wizard," make sure the "file type" is selected as "Delimited" and then click the "Finish" button;
• the responses will be loaded into labeled columns, the number labels correspond to the question numbers on the Evaluation Summary web page and in the "Questions" file you may have requested.

We ask that you use the Feedback link to the left side of the page if you notice any irregularities, have any questions regarding the course evaluation summaries, or if you would like to make suggestions regarding how the online course evaluation access feature may be improved for your needs.

Non-Tuition Courses

Emerson College includes a group of non-tuition courses as part of the evaluation this period using a short survey and comments section. These course sections are presented like the regular class sections above through the demographics section of the summaries. Following the demographic section, evaluation of the faculty advisors using four closed items and two written comment items are presented.

Should you encounter any trouble logging in or accessing the interactive services screen, be sure to e-mail the Office of Academic Affairs and the Office of Academic Affairs will contact IT to work through any problems. Thank you for your time and your attention during this process. The Office of Academic Affairs will work to incorporate your feedback and looks forward to hearing from you.