Course evaluation surveys are typically the most common indirect assessment of courses in Higher Education. These surveys provide students the ability to share their course experiences and feedback with their instructors, so that the instructors can use student feedback to:

1. help identify areas of strength and where improvements can be made in the course
2. serve as evidence of teaching efficacy or excellence for use in faculty promotion and tenure processes, award nominations, etc.

As long as faculty and students have access to their email, they will be able to access the online course evaluation system (e.g., mobile devices, laptops, desktop computers). Each email reminder sent from the Office of Institutional Research (OIR; survey@loyola.edu) will include a table of courses with open evaluations (with personalized links to each) and a personalized link under “Login Instructions” at the bottom of every email. Be sure to remove BOTH the table and the personalized link in the “Login Instructions” if you forward the email to anyone other than OIR. If you accidentally forward any of these, then contact OIR (survey@loyola.edu) as soon as possible so they can help you stop them from working and break their access to your SmartEvals dashboard. Otherwise, these links are automatically broken after 30 days.

Additionally, there should be a link to the SmartEvals course evaluation system in each Moodle course at the top of the course’s homepage. If you accidentally removed this link, then you can re-add it by following the “Add Course Evaluations to your Moodle Course” OTS Knowledge base article. Note: when adding this new link, it is important that you change the “Grade” setting (see step 5) from the default of adding the new External tool (Loyola Course Evaluations) as a graded assignment to one that is not graded – if that is your intention.

The previous location of the Moodle SmartEvals link was the top right corner of each individual's Moodle dashboard (homepage). However, both to improve security and stability of the link, this will now be placed as "Loyola Course Evaluations" or "Course Evaluations" in the top section of each Moodle course's homepages. This allows faculty the easier ability to remind students of that course-specific link. Starting in summer 2023, this will be included in the Moodle course template. This SmartEvals link should always remain in this location in your course so that you and your students can access your respective SmartEvals dashboards. When students click on their dashboard, based on if it is during a course evaluation period and whether they submitted their course evaluation(s), they will see the correct information and instructions. Therefore, please do not remove this external tool resource unless your course is evaluated in a different way outside of the SmartEvals platform (e.g., Psychology courses).

At any point, if you accidentally removed this link, then you can re-add it by following the “Add Course Evaluations to your Moodle Course” OTS Knowledge base article. Note: when adding this new link, it is important that you change the “Grade” setting (see step 5) from the default of adding the new External tool (Loyola Course Evaluations) as a graded assignment to one that is not graded – if that is your intention.

For majority of courses, the course evaluations will be open 2 weeks before Study Day and they will close at 11:59 PM the day before Study Day. Specific details are available on the Academic Year Course Evaluation Schedule.

• Students will receive an email to their Loyola email address directing them to click on their personalized links in the email itself or to log in to Moodle to access and complete their electronic course evaluations. The email will contain a table listing all their open course evaluations for the semester and the window for which each evaluation will be available. Electronic course evaluations will remain open for two weeks and students will receive email reminders throughout that time to complete their open course evaluations.
• Faculty will similarly be notified and sent reminders via email when online course evaluations are open and available to students. The instructor email will contain a table showing each of the open course evaluations assigned to them, the evaluation questionnaire assigned to each course, the evaluation window, and student response rates (as of the time the email was sent). Instructors can also log in to SmartEvals to see their up-to-date course evaluation response rates for each of their courses (see “How can we access the course evaluation system?” FAQ above). In SmartEvals, instructors can access MyEvalCenter and click the "Get QR codes" link for their course(s) to print the page that is displayed and distribute it to their students. Using their mobile devices, students can scan the QR code and complete their course evaluations during class. Keep in mind that this QR code is different for each course/section each semester, so faculty should be sure to update the code(s) as needed in their copied Moodle course(s) from the previous semester.

Although the SmartEvals system anonymizes the student information, from both Loyola faculty and staff, the student is also responsible for maintaining their anonymity. Specifically, students should avoid providing identifiable information in the open-ended question responses (e.g., names, dates, specific events, or discussions) that the instructor could use to identify the student respondent.

However, if a threat is made in the student evaluation response, self-harm or against another individual, then Loyola will be informed by SmartEvals and Loyola will be able to formally request identification of the student and information about the threat. Loyola will still not have access to the specific student's response(s). 

Yes. Although SmartEvals does not allow instructors to identify which students participated, as needed, there is a workaround. You can request that students take a screenshot of their SmartEvals dashboard that includes their name, your course’s tile, and “Completed” under that tile – and then share that with you (via email, Moodle, or any additional way you specify to them). Therefore, students are responsible for providing the course evaluation participation evidence to any faculty that request that.

No. Only you will see your dashboard when you click on the links. Similarly, students clicking on the link will only take them to their individual SmartEvals dashboard. As an example, if Jane Doe clicks the button through Moodle or the reminder email links, then she will only see the course evaluations that are available for Jane Doe - or a message that says that there are none for her to complete at this time.

Faculty and students can only access their electronic course evaluations by entering their Loyola login credentials through Moodle or via each of the SmartEvals-related emails in the table of courses with open evaluations (with personalized links to each) as well as a personalized link at the bottom under “Login instructions.” Access through Moodle is password-protected. 

Access through the table of courses with open evaluations (with personalized links to each) as well as the personalized link in the “Login Instructions” at the bottom of email reminders are NOT password-protected. Therefore, either remove BOTH the table and the personalized link in the “Login Instructions” prior to forwarding any emails to anyone outside of OIR – OR – do not forward SmartEvals email reminders to anyone outside of OIR. If you accidentally forward any of these, then contact OIR (survey@loyola.edu) as soon as possible so they can help you stop them from working and break their access to your SmartEvals dashboard. Otherwise, these links are automatically broken after 30 days.

If the course is recorded in Loyola’s Colleague system as being co-taught, then the system will have separate “Instructor Impact” question sets (5 questions) for each co-instructor. The name of the co-instructor will be at the top of each of the “Instructor Impact” question sets so that the students know which co-instructor they are evaluating. Also, the co-instructors will only receive the responses from their own “Instructor Impact” question sets. Co-instructors will not have access to their co-instructor’s responses for those instructor-specific questions. However, the common questions that are the same for the course – will be the same and shared between both instructors in their respective reports.

Some courses are excluded from the SmartEvals system since the evaluation process is not applicable to them, e.g. Psychology courses (the Psychology Department uses a different online course evaluation survey that they will email to their students directly); courses offered at other non-Loyola locations, such as study abroad or study away; etc.

Also, if a course has fewer than 5 students enrolled, then no evaluation will be administered. This is done as a measure to ensure student confidentiality. However, you can request that your students provide feedback directly to you (e.g., email, written note, discussion) or provide you with a letter of support that you could use for your promotion and tenure, etc. that describes your teaching and their resulting learning. If your students are willing, then they are free to provide that type of feedback to you outside of this online course evaluation system.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to OIR (survey@loyola.edu) if you think you are missing a course that you think should be included in the SmartEvals system for course evaluation.

Ordinarily, an electronic course evaluation will take students less than 10 minutes to complete. Generally, each course evaluation form will have 18 total questions with several that ask for a written response and the majority that ask students to select the most applicable response. 

However, there are cases when there are additional questions on the survey. For example, certain course types may require additional question sets and courses with more than one instructor will ask students to complete the 5 “Instructor Impact” questions for each instructor. See Survey Form Setup for more details.

There is a small window of time between the start of the end-of-semester evaluation periods opening and when OIR and SmartEvals stop the connection between Loyola’s Colleague system and the SmartEvals system – until at least after the two-week-long evaluation period. If a student was to withdraw from the course in that small window of time or during the evaluation period, then SmartEvals would not have been able to be updated to indicate they are no longer enrolled in the course. Therefore, those withdrawn students would still receive emails requesting that they complete the course’s course evaluation as if they were still enrolled in the course. You can contact OIR (survey@loyola.edu) with proof of the student’s withdrawal date from the course, to request that they be removed from that particular course’s roster, so they don’t continue to receive email reminders to complete your course’s survey.

Otherwise, as soon as the Loyola’s Colleague system and the SmartEvals system are reconnected, then any withdrawn students’ course evaluations will be removed from the course from which they withdrew. This will occur prior to when the results are released to faculty and they are emailed their PDF reports, so that the values of participants in those reports and in the SmartEvals instructor dashboards have the same final number of respondents.

Please see the details provided in the Survey Completion section of the course evaluation process.

SmartEvals will not bounce back from Loyola’s email system and should not be directed towards the Junk folder, unlike if you were to use a non-Loyola email. If you are using a different email, then you might accidentally “Unsubscribe” yourself from one of the SmartEvals systems, which means you will not be able to receive any emails from SmartEvals again. If this happens, please contact OIR (survey@loyola.edu) and we can re-subscribe you to SmartEvals.

To change your primary email in SmartEvals, you must update your primary email address in Loyola’s Colleague system. To do that, you need to reach out to the HR hiring partner (Toya Dailey-Smith; tdailey-smith@loyola.edu) or HR program assistant (Brianna Perry; bperry1@loyola.edu).

To change your name in SmartEvals, you must update your name in Loyola’s Colleague system. To do that, you need to reach out to the HR hiring partner (Toya Dailey-Smith; tdailey-smith@loyola.edu) or HR program assistant (Brianna Perry; bperry1@loyola.edu).

Please see the details provided in the Result Dissemination and Analysis section of the course evaluation process. Additionally, see “How can we access the course evaluation system?” on how to access your personalized SmartEvals dashboard.

Please note that OIR and SmartEvals have put certain settings in place to help ensure student confidentiality that might affect your access to reports for certain courses. For instance,

1. only courses with 5 or more students are included in the course evaluation process/SmartEvals system (For possible alternatives for student feedback from small enrollment courses, see "I cannot see my current course(s) from this semester. Why would that be?"); and
2. reports are not shared for courses that had 3 or fewer student respondents (To help ensure you have enough participants, see Increase response rate ideas provided in the Course Evaluation Best Practices Resources section of the Faculty Resources and Training website).

Data visualizations of all the survey form questions cannot be shown in the graphs in the course evaluation report PDF files. This is based on two factors:

1. There is a limitation in the reporting capabilities of SmartEvals when generating graph images on the report PDF pages which only allows the first twelve questions to be shown.
2. The length of the survey form exceeds twelve questions.

Therefore, any questions beyond the first twelve questions in the form are not shown in the graph. To avoid confusion, OIR has turned off the feature to display graphs in the report PDF files.

However, faculty can go to their SmartEvals dashboard (see “How can we access the course evaluation system?” FAQ above, as needed) and generate custom reports (including graphs) based on any question(s) they choose. To find out more about custom reporting in SmartEvals for any completed and released course evaluation report, follow the instructions in the resources provided in the SmartEvals Training section of the Faculty Resources and Training website.

Go to your SmartEvals dashboard (see “How can we access the course evaluation system?” FAQ above, as needed). For any completed and released course evaluation report, follow the instructions in the resources provided in the SmartEvals Training section of the Faculty Resources and Training website.

Unless faculty send their individual course evaluation reports to their respective Department Chair, Dean, etc. – then those administrators will not be able to see them. Be sure to remove the personalized link in the “Login Instructions” if you forward the email with your course evaluation results attached as PDF(s), to ensure your SmartEvals account is not accessed by someone that is not you. If you accidentally forward this link, then contact OIR (survey@loyola.edu) as soon as possible so they can help you stop the link from working and break its access to your SmartEvals dashboard. Otherwise, this link is automatically broken after 30 days.

The Instructor Celebration is an individualized presentation SmartEvals has created for each instructor based upon the student responses to the “What are the major strengths of this course?” question in the common course evaluation survey form. They are not always verbatim, but they get at the main ideas of the students’ responses. The “Instructor Celebration” link is available on the top menu in your SmartEvals dashboard. After clicking on this, you can copy your specific Instructor Celebration URL and share it in your email signature, website, or as part of your other self-promotion activities.

The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European regulation standard for data protection and privacy. Since Loyola University, like many Higher Education institutions, has students/faculty that are either studying/teaching in Europe (e.g., Study Abroad) or that are European citizens. Therefore, to comply with the European GDPR, SmartEvals has included a link for individuals to remove themselves from the system such that their personal data is not included on the platform. Only individuals that have non-education email addresses (e.g., gmail, yahoo) as their SmartEvals email of record will be allowed to request this removal due to the GDPR. However, the final removal of the individuals will not be performed until after review by OIR staff to ensure the user did not mean to do this or, upon explanation of the consequences of removal from SmartEvals, will not want to be removed. Specifically, faculty that are permanently removed from SmartEvals would not be able to access their course evaluation reports and would not receive their reports at the end of each term through the SmartEvals automated emailing system. Therefore, the Provost’s office has decided that faculty requests for removal from the SmartEvals system shall not be approved – to ensure faculty have continued access to their course evaluation reports.

You can contact the Office of Institutional Research (OIR; survey@loyola.edu) with any questions or concerns regarding course evaluations.