An apple for the teacher End of Course Evaluations, or Student Surveys, are questionnaires completed by students near the end of most terms using Explorance Blue.

Students will receive an email through their ACES account with a direct link to their surveys and a request for their participation. Faculty should encourage all students to participate in this process.

One suggestion to increase student participation is to use a computer classroom or computer lab setting and allow time for students to complete the survey toward the end of a regular class period (~15 minutes). You may offer extra credit, etc., but do not interfere with student completion of the survey. You may also direct students to complete the survey on their own time and devices.

Blue offers a Response Management function that gives you the ability to monitor the response rate and to resend the student link as needed. A faculty training guide is available in ACES, Employee tab, that features the following:

How to review your response rate
How to see which students have responded
How to resend the link to students who have not responded

To actually view which students have actually completed the survey as well as to resend the link to those who have not completed the survey, please look in your Alamo email for a message from dst-academic success that contains a link titled "Please click here to view current response rates." For example:

End of Course Surveys Email

Please also follow the helpful guidance in this document: Student Responses and Resending the Survey Link.pdf

This document shows when surveys are available to students: 22-23 Important Semester Information_v2 8-19-22.pdf

Results of the surveys are reported to the individual instructor, chairs, and the VPAS. You may not receive the results within the same semester or term. Not all terms are surveyed, due to the brevity of terms such as Maymester.

More guidance from DST-Academic Success

End of Course Student Surveys

Best Practice: To increase student participation, dedicate the last 10-15 minutes of a class and ask everyone to pull out their mobile devices. Blue is a mobile-friendly web-hosted
Survey Duration is based on course length:

5-week course or less: open for 1 week
6-8 week course: 2 weeks
9 weeks or longer: 3 weeks
All surveys open on Mondays

All surveys close on the Sunday prior to the start of Finals
Reminders sent one week after the survey opens, and again the Friday before the survey closes
Faculty can see the list of who has completed the survey
Faculty can send reminders to students from the system
Canvas popup!
Results Available notification sent Friday after grading deadline

For questions or further guidance, please email dst-academicsuccess@alamo.edu.