Evaluation of teachings at the WU Wien with KM’s EVALUATE

Case description

Course instructors can chose between existing templates and modules of questions in English or in German language or define part of the questions themselves. Upon completion the draft is printed and sent on the very same day. The census is carried out paper based because students want to fill in the questionnaire at the auditorium where normally no adequate IT-infrastructure is available to enable an online evaluation.

The filled in forms are imported inclusive the open questions by dint of a scanner solution of Kasier Data and afterwards automatically interpreted by our software. The answer vouchers are collected at the WU-intern data warehouse, ready to be used for the study program reports. The system is integrated in the WU learn management system Learn@WU, where lecturers can find the detailed report already only one day after the evaluation. Following the results can be released WU-internally in narrated form by the lecturer. At the end of each semester the lecturers are given additionally the benchmark data, which enables them to compare their courses with others.

The system was set into full operation after a half semester beta test phase in winter 2006/07. On the whole there had been evaluated 1,863 courses in this period which necessitated the handling of 40,000 questionnaires and 1,000,000 single answers. The system is capable of scanning approximately 2,000 two-sided forms an hour. To ensure the high requirements to functionality and system activity within a net development period of only five months, the OpenACS / DotLRN-based system was chosen as the technological basic principle, which is not only used at the WU but also at the Leopold-Franzens Universität Innsbruck for large-scale tests.

Currently there is an online version of the evaluation under way, which is expected to go on trial operation at the second half of summer semester 2007. Thereby it will be possible to do without the paper based method of collecting data at lectures that have adequate IT-infrastructure.

Screenshots

	The evaluations are displayed for each lecturer clearly arranged at the main page.
	It can be chosen between six ready-made templates, which are available in English and in German language.
	Via a user friendly mask editing the questionnaire accordingly to the lecturer’s wishes is easy to do. Thereby additional modules of questions can be integrated from a catalogue of questions.