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Procedures for Online FCQ Administration

The Boulder campus Office of Planning, Budget, and Analysis (PBA) administers the Faculty Course Questionnaire program for the Boulder, Denver, and Colorado Springs campuses of the University of Colorado.

Most courses are evaluated on paper forms. For online courses, we currently use the procedure described below.

PBA sends students enrolled in online courses an email with the location (URL) of a web form for the course, and a unique random code number. If a student is taking more than one course, they get only one code number, which will work for all courses that student is taking.

To respond, each student must go to the appropriate URL and enter the code number if it is asked for. The number is used to verify enrollment in the course, and to temporarily store the responses, to avoid the possibility of multiple responses from one person. The site does stay open for more than a week, and students could change their minds and submit a second form, but, unless subsequent submissions are obviously mistake, we will keep only the last submission from each student. Obvious mistakes are blank or partially filled forms, when a more complete form had been submitted earlier.

While student ID numbers are used to obtain students' email addresses, and names are kept in case students contact us about having lost or not received their code numbers, they are never associated with students' responses.

After one week of collection, the code numbers of the responses received are used to mark students' records in our database. The SID, name, and email address for each respondent are deleted from the database that could associate the code number with a student. A reminder email is then sent to each student who did not respond during the first week. When collection is complete, all SIDs, names, and email addresses are deleted from the database, so that nobody could associate any response with a particular student, or tell who did or did not respond. We then assign a sequence number to each set of responses. The sequence number is used to keep ratings and comments from each student together in our files, and is unrelated to the student's ID, so that they will not sort in the same order as the instructor's list of the IDs.

After finals week, and after grades have been posted, the instructor is sent two reports. The first, an FCQ section report identical to that produced for paper forms, summarizes the ratings (i.e., percentage A, B, C, D, F; average rating; comparison to other courses). The second lists both ratings and comments made by each student, identified by sequence number.

Please send any comments on this method, and suggestions for alternatives, to FCQ@Colorado.EDU. Thanks!