Department Admin

Training Videos

We have prepared 6 training videos that should cover most aspects of the work you will do as a course evaluation department administrator. They can be found here:
Department Admin Training Videos

The current set of videos were produced and released early Fall 2023. Our plan is to update them every summer and release them every fall, as we endeavor to enhance our operations and tools for efficiency and ease of use.

Most everything else below is a more detailed text version of what is shown in the videos.

Work with the MySurveys Administrators

A sizable portion of your work will be working with MySurveys administrators. The work is year-round, with lulls during times of low activity.

The main tools you will be using for contact with the MySurveys team are Microsoft Teams (a collaboration platform), Microsoft Planner (a project management task-based software), Microsoft Excel (spreadsheet software), and Microsoft OneNote (a notebook information storage software).

• Teams is used for Chat (to ask or answer questions and verify details), Files (to house the mini and full-term course lists and TA lists you’ll use to verify deployments), and an Activity Feed (that lets you know when chat messages and task notifications arrive).
• Planner is used for tasks—to quality check the work of our office importing courses and instructors, and to verify or change your department's Guidelines for Evaluation each semester. Task notifications arrive by e-mail and in Teams.
• Excel is used for the mini and full-term courses lists, and TA lists, that you may use to quality check which courses and instructors you want evaluated for the term, along with other course details.
• OneNote is used for important information storage, such as your department Guidelines for Evaluation, recommendations for deployment lengths of mini and summer courses, and how to determine if an issue is administration or support.

Guidelines for Evaluation

In Fall Semester 2022 we changed operational workflow with department administrators by introducing the Guidelines for Evaluation. These are guidelines, or criteria if you will, that your department uses to determine which courses to evaluate, or not to evaluate. Our thinking was that if we could have this information in advance, much of the process of course evaluation prep would run more smoothly and efficiently. These Guidelines can be found in a OneNote file in the Files area of your Teams department channel.

Workflow Breakdown

Here is the general semester by semester workflow:

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Weeks 1-4

• We send you a Microsoft Planner Task to update your department Guidelines for Evaluation (if needed). We set this task deadline at the end of Week 4.
• We send you a Microsoft Planner Task asking you to fill out your TAs to be Evaluated Excel spreadsheet. You will find this spreadsheet in the Files area of Teams (current semester folder). We set this task deadline at the end of Week 10.
• We import mini-course data into the CES system based on your Guidelines for Evaluation. We base the deployment dates for mini courses upon our recommendations found in your department OneNote file. The dates can be changed upon your discretion during quality checking—we just ask that you keep the survey end date set as the last day of the class.
• We send you a Microsoft Planner Task asking you to quality check our mini course data importing and set up. We set this task deadline for 2 weeks from the date we send you the task. You will check course data in the Manage Courses area of the CES admin site. To assist with your checking, we will load an MCL (mini course list) into the Files area of your channel. This list is our best interpretation of which courses you want evaluated based on your guidelines.
• Please let us know what we need to repair (if anything) through the Task comment area OR through your Teams channel Posts (chat) area.

Weeks 5-12

• We import full-term course data into the CES system based on your Guidelines for Evaluation.
• When we have completed importing, we’ll send you another Planner task asking you to quality check our work. The deadline for that task will be 3 weeks after the date it’s sent. Please thoroughly look over your courses in the Manage Courses area of the CES site. To assist with your checking, we will load an FTCL (full-term course list) into the Files area of your channel. This list is our best interpretation of which courses you want evaluated based on your guidelines.
• When you are done, let us know if all is OK or, if changes need to be made, make them in the comments area of the task, or your Teams channel Posts (chat) area, and we will correct any remaining items.
• Although mostly an instructor-led endeavor, sometimes DAs will work with the CES administrators in deploying midterm evaluations. When this happens, it occurs within this time window, but separate from the standard semester workflow.

Weeks 13 & 14

• In these two weeks, we will be making final corrections to course data, correcting e-mail addresses if needed, and setting up student enrollment “refreshes” (to catch withdrawals and other unique enrollment situations).

Weeks 15 & 16

• This is deployment time for full term courses. The deployment lasts 14 days, ending the last day of classes (usually the Saturday before finals week).

Post semester

• About 15 days after the semester is over (11 days during the summer), you will have access to instructor's reports, and the tools available to create aggregate or other types of reports, if desired.

Note: The summer session workflow is somewhat similar to the above, and will be divided into segements depending on when sessions end. We will post the summer workflow schedule in the Shared Channel each year in mid-May.

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Develop and Manage a Communication System with Department Instructors

Communicate with the instructors in your department to check on course details needed for proper, accurate course evaluation deployment. You will be checking with instructors about what courses will be evaluated, who will be evaluated, and any unique accommodation some course evaluations might need. This information is necessary when conducting quality control over course and user data.

You may use whichever type of communication system works efficiently for you and your instructors. The data you get from them will help you verify the course data and get it to the CES administrators by a pre-determined deadline.

Managing Course Data - Highlights

Courses should have at least one student and one instructor assigned. Per your department guidelines, courses such as Independent Study, Doctoral courses with a single or a few students, research courses, etc. may not require an evaluation from the professors.

Student & Instructor Enrollment, even well into the semester, can change. Although CES has a user refresh procedure, Department Admin’s should work with instructors to check that the enrollments in their courses are accurate.

TA Evaluations: Another important detail: Is the TA being evaluated as 1) a TA in a lecture course, or 2) as an instructor in, say, a recitation or lab section? In the first case, we do not have a standard set of questions, so TA questions would have to be provided for our office to create and attach. In the second case, the CAS college has a standard set of questions for TA's in this situation. Other colleges could use the use main campus survey for the TA's, or provide other questions.

Mini-Course Deployment Dates need to be reviewed to accurately reflect the start and end dates for when the evaluation should be deployed. All mini course evaluation deployments must end the last day of classes in the course, as designated in MyRed.

Add Department Questions

In addition to the core survey questions that all students will answer, department questions can be added to the survey. Using the Survey Builder, you can create questions specific to your department as "targeted" surveys.

Note: Custom questions can only be added before a course evaluation has been deployed. Once an evaluation has deployed, questions can no longer be added, removed, or revised.

The Help Center in CES, found by clicking on the question mark icon (?) in the upper right corner, has many tutorials and articles to help with this process.

How do I add questions?

Video Tutorial:

• Custom Questions for Administrators & Instructors

Help Article:

• Administrator: Survey Builder – Additional Properties

Video Tutorials & Help Articles Combined:

• Administrator: Branching Question Types
• Administrator: Survey Builder – Types of Survey Questions

Optional

Modify Deployment Window (Start/End) Dates

Starting out, all full-term courses have a deployment window set for 14 days (usually starting on a Saturday, and ending on the Saturday just before Final Exam week). Should any courses need a shorter deployment window, select the courses tab, search for the course, and then click edit to make the appropriate adjustment.

Monitor Instructors’ Custom Questions

As the Department Admin, it is possible for you to monitor instructors adding their own custom questions for their course(s). Using the Custom Question Monitor widget on your homepage, you will be able to see the number of instructors that have added custom questions out of all the instructors in your department. By clicking view all, you can see which instructors have added them with course information, you can view the custom questions themselves, and have other options to view and edit.