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Procedures for Online FCQ Administration

The Boulder campus Office of Planning, Budget, and Analysis (PBA) administers the Faculty Course Questionnaire program for the Boulder, Denver, and Colorado Springs campuses of the University of Colorado.

Most courses are evaluated on paper forms. For Boulder campus, beginning with spring 2006, all graduate-only sections of 10 or fewer students have been required to use online FCQs. This is intended to enhance the anonymity of graduate student responses in these small sections, by eliminating handwriting from the submissions. For other classroom-based sections on Boulder campus, the online FCQ is optional, and is requested by the department coordinator during the FCQ course list editing period (weeks 5 - 7 each term) based on department and/or instructor preference. For online-only courses (primarily at Denver and Colorado Springs campuses), the online FCQ is always used.

For summer 2006 only, all FCQs were administered online, using the existing FCQ questions and format, in order to aid our transition to the new FCQ form in fall 2006. If you would like more information about the transition to the new FCQ form, please click here.

For online courses and others using online FCQ administration, we currently use the procedure described below.

PBA sends students enrolled in participating course sections a customized email invitation with a link (URL) to a web form for the course and a unique, random 7-digit "passcode" number. Students taking more than one course receive only one passcode, which will work for all courses the student is taking that term. A passcode is good for one term only.

To respond, each student must go to the appropriate URL (for a course-section) linked directly from the email, or to an alternate all-courses URL (for Boulder, Continuing Ed, Denver, or UCCS), where the student selects the course-section from a list and enters the passcode by hand. The passcode is used to verify enrollment in the course and to store the responses temporarily, to avoid the possibility of multiple responses from one person. If multiple forms for a single course are submitted from a single passcode, we take the last submitted form with any items answered.

Students who lose their passcodes should go to the all-courses URL. At that site the student may verify enrollment by providing birth date and last four digits of the student ID.

For regular term-long courses we open the FCQ online website a few days before regular (paper) FCQ administration begins, and close it a few days after paper administration ends. This way two weekends are always included and students have approximately 10 - 12 days to respond. The website is always closed before finals begin.

The questions in the FCQ form used online are identical to those used on paper, with the addition of a final narrative response question, "Comments for FCQ Administrators": "What did you like and not like about this method of collecting course evaluations?"

While student ID numbers are used to obtain students' email addresses, and names are kept in case students contact us about having lost or not received their passcodes, they are never associated with students' responses. Student ID's and names are never stored on the web server where collection takes place. Student responses are anonymous.

After about one week of collection, the passcodes of the responses received are used to mark students' records in our database. Each respondent's student ID, name, and email address are deleted from the database, breaking the association between the passcode and an individual student. A reminder email is then sent to each student who did not respond during the first week. When the number of responses is less than 50% of enrollment, we send a third email just before the last day of collection.

See sample email messages and reminders.

When collection is complete, all student ID's, names, and email addresses are deleted from the database, so that no one can associate any response with a particular student, or determine who did or did not respond. The pass codes are generated by a process that ensures that no one, not even someone who knows the generation procedure, can link student ID's to pass codes. The pass codes are 7-digit numbers, not consecutive, so would be extremely tedious to guess.

For reporting and data storage we then assign a sequence number to each set of responses. Sequence numbers are used to keep ratings and comments from each student together in our files, and are unrelated to the student's ID, so that they will not sort in the same order as the instructor's list of the ID's.

After finals week, and after grades have been posted, the instructor is sent two reports. The first, an FCQ section report identical to that produced for paper forms, summarizes the ratings (i.e., percentage A, B, C, D, F; average rating; comparison to other courses). The second, an FCQ response compilation, lists both ratings and comments made by each student, identified by sequence number.

Please send any comments on this method, and suggestions for alternatives, to FCQ@Colorado.EDU. Thanks!

Last updated - 22MAY06 - L:\fcq\code\webform\OnlineProcedures.doc