Assessing educational outcomes is becoming increasingly important for universities, and one of the most common measures used is the end or mid-course evaluations. Student evaluation of teaching is an anonymous survey completed by the students of courses or classes, to reflect upon the efficacy of the course. It is one of the most commonly used measures in colleges and universities that generate essential information for the institutional decision-makers, administrators and faculty employees on whether the courses are meeting student expectations and how their learning experiences can be improved.

Students can provide the best perspective and ratings of their educators as they have daily contact with them. Asking students to reflect upon what is going on in the classroom and how they are experiencing the course materials, course instructors, and grading helps educators create courses that support the personalized student experience. As a result, course evaluations play a huge part in the educational outcomes for your students and also help your teaching staff in improving their courses.

Capitalize on Canvas and Qualtrics to boost student response rates in course evaluations

Knowing the importance and benefits of course evaluations it is important to ensure that both the students and your staff responsible for course evaluation set-up have the best user experience.

Improving user experience for the students taking the survey will help in boosting the response rates which as a result will help in improving your education. With the improved user experience, your staff can focus on improving the educational experience instead of spending extra time and effort on getting more student responses.

“By embedding surveys as assignments in Canvas through Qualtrics LTI, response rates increased from the mid-30% range up to 57%. That’s the highest we’ve ever seen them.”

Kate Hendriks, Manager Surveying & Reporting at Chamberlain University

Remove friction in student experience when taking Qualtrics surveys by streamlining them in Canvas

Many universities and colleges already have Qualtrics and Canvas in place, but often miss the opportunity to integrate them. Some traditional solutions educators use are separate survey tools, forms, or simply pasting Qualtrics survey links in Canvas courses.

This approach creates friction in the student experience when taking surveys as they have to leave their Canvas learning environment to a separate one to take a survey. Resulting in decreased response rates and poor student experience.

Populate Qualtrics course evaluation surveys within Canvas

Ideally, students should be able to take their course evaluation surveys within the Canvas environment which will have a positive impact on the survey response rates. Populating Qualtrics surveys within Canvas eliminates the need for students to leave their learning environment making the course evaluation survey process faster and more convenient.

When the process for course evaluations is easy to access, efficient, and user-friendly, faculty and students are more likely to engage and provide valuable feedback. This will lead to a more positive and productive evaluation process, and allow institutions to make data-driven improvements to their educational offerings.

Improved Qualtrics survey experience

By using Qualtrics course evaluation surveys within Canvas, your surveys are optimized for mobile devices, providing students with a smooth, responsive experience on their smartphones and tablets. This provides flexibility for the students to complete the evaluations of the teaching outside the classroom and gives the respondents more time to complete the survey. This allows students to complete evaluations at any time and place and often leads to deeper insights as students have more time to reflect on their answers.

Leverage Qualtrics and Canvas to create powerful surveys

Qualtrics LTI will enhance the user experience for students leading to increased response rates, valuable feedback for educators, and better educational outcomes for students.

To fully utilize student feedback it is crucial to consider both the quality and quantity of data. Embedded data fields in Qualtrics surveys can be used to embed data that already exists in Canvas. Embedding data such as student, course or enrollment information can be used to collect more accurate data as students no longer need to manually fill it out. Such automation improves the quality of your data for report or analysis purposes and as a result, also paints a complete and accurate picture of the student experience.

Delve deeper to learn more about how data from Canvas can be used in Qualtrics surveys to facilitate quality data and better analytic outcomes.