Procedures for Online FCQ Administration

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 online FCQ portal (for CU-Boulder, CU-Boulder Continuing Ed, CU 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.

Students who lose their passcodes should go to the alternate online FCQ portal. 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 in fall and spring, 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 for fall and spring terms. For summer, when classes have highly irregular starting and ending dates, multiple online FCQ administration periods are used; each class is put into the online administration period which best matches its calendar. However, in summer, the online FCQ is sometimes administered after the class has ended, because the summer calendar is so irregular, and it is impossible for us to customize summer administration periods to perfectly fit each class. The length of an online FCQ administration period in summer may be shorter than that used in fall and spring semesters.

The CU-Boulder and UCCS campuses use the same set of standard FCQ questions; the CU Denver has its own set of standard FCQ questions. The questions in the FCQ form used online are identical to those used on paper. See:
    • CU-Boulder, UCCS: online FCQ form vs. paper FCQ form
    • CU Denver: online FCQ form vs. paper FCQ form

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 responses are anonymous.

After 5-6 days of online FCQ data 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 have not yet submitted all of their online FCQs. A student may receive up to two more reminder emails by the time the online FCQ administration period closes.

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.

Online FCQ results are printed out and returned to the department at the same time as paper FCQs:
    • Fall term: returned mid-January
    • Spring term: returned early to mid-June
    • Summer term: returned mid-September
Instructors receive two reports for each of their classes served with online FCQs. The first, an FCQ section report identical to that produced for paper forms, summarizes the ratings (i.e., average ratings and comparison to peers). The second, an FCQ response compilation, lists both ratings and comments made by each student, identified by sequence number. This FCQ response compilation replaces the information normally gained from the paper FCQs themselves.

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