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

Instructors can also choose to run a midcourse survey through other means, such as Google Forms or Canvas. This gives the instructor greater flexibility about the questions asked, and more options about when to run the survey. Information is available for other options to run midcourse survey on your own.

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?