Creating Midcourse Surveys

Whether you are creating a survey for general-purpose information gathering from your students, or to supplement the SIRS with your own questions, you’ll find that there are several survey tools to choose from. Below are a few that we have found to be particularly useful for surveying students in a course, with instructions on how to use them.

Please keep in mind that surveys for research or publication must meet legal requirements, possibly including Human Subjects Certification. Please contact the Office of Research Regulatory Affairs for guidance.

Additional information about using midcourse surveys is available in our recorded midcourse workshop (login to Canvas required).

Survey Options Available at Rutgers

Blue: Blue is the system used for the end-of-semester Student Instructional Rating Survey. We have created a process to support midcourse surveys using the same framework. The midcourse surveys can be turned on for any course by the administrators in each academic unit, with options to send the survey results to the instructor alone, or to both the instructor and the department administration.

Canvas Quizzes: For instructors already using Canvas, you can add a semi-anonymous, ungraded quiz to collect survey responses from students in your class. Read how to create a survey in the Canvas quiz tool, or use the “Commons” tool to search for “Midcourse Survey Template.”

Google Forms: Recommended. Easy to use, quick to set up, and handles many question types (scales, comments, multiple choice, etc.). You can use a Rutgers ScarletMail account, or a standard Google account will also work. Read how to create a survey in Google Documents, or sign in with your ScarletMail address and use the “template gallery” (upper-right corner) to see the ready-made “OTEAR Midcourse Template”.

Microsoft Forms (Rutgers Connect): Recommended. Easy to use, quick to set up, and handles many question types (scales, comments, multiple choice, etc.). You could try duplicating the OTEAR Midcourse Template in Rutgers Connect, adding your preferred questions, and distributing it to your students.

Qualtrics: Qualtrics is a robust and complicated survey platform, and is better suited for research and general-purpose surveys. If you are already familiar with Qualtrics, you can use it for a simple midcourse survey. https://rutgers.qualtrics.com/

Midcourse Surveys in Blue

OTEAR provides an ability for department administrators to optionally run Midcourse Surveys centrally through the Blue survey system. These are a great formative tool to determine how students are feeling about the course and to alter or clarify aspects accordingly. Midcourse surveys are typically run in the 7th week of the course, and instructors receive the student feedback immediately after the survey ends.

To enable a midcourse survey, the department administrator will use the “DIG” survey setup process to turn on the option for any course. The option can be changed individually or in bulk for a large set of courses. Administrators can choose to send the survey results only to the instructor, or to both the instructor and the department.

The instructor will be notified a few days before the start of the survey that they may add questions in addition to the standard midcourse questions (see below). Students will complete the midcourse surveys at https://sirs.rutgers.edu/blue

Midcourse Questions

The standard midcourse includes four questions. The first two are Likert-scale questions from strongly disagree to strongly agree:

• The instructor was prepared for class and presented material in an organized manner.
• The instructor responds effectively to student comments and questions.

The last two questions are open-ended comment questions:

• What do you like most about this course?
• What do you think needs improvement and how should these improvements be made?