Instructors will receive s periodically, alerting them of their current response rates. Additionally, each will contain tips on boosting

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1 SmartEvals Guide SmartEvals is a tool that UT Arlington uses to launch, administer, and compile reports on course evaluations. This purpose of this guide is to provide users with a reference guide to quickly access the most important features of SmartEvals. Accessing SmartEvals can be done in several ways, such as going to utarlington.smartevals.com, clicking on links within course evaluation s, and through a link on UT Arlington s Learning Management System. The majority of users will access SmartEvals though s sent via the communication system. When a course becomes available for surveying (one week before the last day of the course if it meets for less than 15 weeks; two weeks before if the class meets for more than 15 weeks), an is sent to both students and instructors notifying them of the available evaluation. The instructor will appear as the following:

2 Instructors will receive s periodically, alerting them of their current response rates. Additionally, each will contain tips on boosting response rates. Students will receive reminder s that contain links to all their incomplete evaluations. Each will contain a link at the bottom of the page that will direct the user to the SmartEvals login page. Logging into SmartEvals is a simple process, as it makes use of UT Arlington s Single Sign-On (SSO). Upon entering their information, users will be taken to the My EvalCenter page:

3 myevalcenter myevalcenter is the home page of SmartEvals, and contains all the functions users will need to monitor active evaluations, interact with students, and create customized reports of results. In the above image, you will notice that the overall response rate is readily visible in the center of the header; this shows the user their combined response rates in all courses for which evaluations are active. The body of the page contains user results that are available on-demand. The user will see a square for each course that has been evaluated. This square will contain the name of the course, when it was taught, the number of responses received, and the total response rate. Clicking the magnifying glass in the bottom left corner of the square will give you a preview of the questions that students were asked. If applicable, the user will also see the Open Surveys tab, which lists course evaluations that are currently in progress:

4 Contacting Students Although students will receive automatic reminders to complete their evaluations, faculty are greatly encouraged to remind their students as well. SmartEvals can assist with this in a few ways. First, the Alert in the top left corner of myevalcenter will notify an instructor if they have not yet used SmartEvals to send them an . From the button that says Click here to change , the instructor will be given the option either to set up repeated automatic reminder notices, or to send a single to students in the class. This process can also be done by clicking the Edit drop down arrow, then clicking Students Additionally, instructors have the option to print out a QR code for their students to use. By selecting the Handouts drop down arrow at the top of the page and then choosing QR Handouts, SmartEvals will print QR codes that students can scan to take their surveys; this is particularly useful for those instructors who utilize time in class to complete evaluations. The same QR code can be used for multiple students, so there is no need to print out a code for every student in the course. Instructors can also let their students know their feedback is valued by sending them a thank you note. This can be done by going to the Edit drop down arrow, and selecting Thank You Note.

5 Reports If an instructor has results available, they will be visible on their myevalcenter page: Each course with available results will appear as a square under the Results Ready for Viewing banner. As with Open Courses, these squares will contain the name of the course, when it was taught, the number of responses received, and the total response rate. Clicking the See Reports button will take the user to the Reporting interface.

6 The reporting interface allows instructors to generate custom tables and reports. By default, each question on the evaluation is displayed, along with average score, standard deviation, and the averages of the instructor s department. These settings can be changed through use of the Choose Columns and Choose Questions buttons. Using the drop down arrows at the top of the screen, instructors have the ability to select multiple courses as well. The Comments tab will display comments received in evaluations. SmartEvals can also create a word cloud from student comments, which allows the instructor to identify recurring themes in the open-ended questions. Percentile Rank will display a chart comparing a user s scores to others. Comparison groups can be customized as the user wishes. For those who wish to view a single evaluation independent of other scores, Individual Reports allows the user to retrieve these reports.

7 A series of video tutorials can be found on the SmartEvals website. It is highly recommended that new users watch these tutorials, as they are informative and easy to follow. Users should focus on the Instructor selection in the Category drop down menu. Clicking the link below will provide access to the tutorials: