AEFIS - Eval: Using AEFIS as an Administrator

Understanding your role

As an AEFIS departmental (or college) administrator, you serve as the primary actor regarding your college's or department's course evaluations. You can create, edit, assign and distribute the course evaluations. Then, when evaluations are complete (for a given semester) and responses have been submitted, you can run reports and extract all this important information for your college or department.

This page is intended to explain how AEFIS course evaluations are built, distributed and managed. Many links will take you to our own UW-Madison KnowledgeBase (KB). Other links may take you to vendor-sponsored online documentation.

Course evaluations, like all surveys, are both a science and an art form; there are good and less-good strategies and designs. If not planned and executed well, course evaluations can produce questionable results, and can actually be counterproductive. We recommend you talk with your college or department leadership to ensure the right people are making the decisions about the data being sought, how these evaluations are going to address those data needs, and what role you are to play in this evaluation process.

This documentation addresses how to create a course evaluation within AEFIS. To address broader questions about best practices, language and evaluation design, we  recommend  Course Evaluation Surveys, a helpful resource document authored by the Student Learning Assessment group.

Understanding the semester evaluation cycle

Through each semester, AEFIS administrators need to consider the following activities.

  • Evaluation surveys need to be created and scheduled (unless this has been done previously, the survey was set to repeat each semester, and no changes are desired).
  • Specific course sections need to be assign to the semester's survey instance.
  • On a predetermined date, the surveys will become available to the students, (typically two weeks before the last day of classes). Students will (typically) have two weeks to complete the survey. During this time, AEFIS administrators can monitor completion rates, and notify instructors of that progress. 
  • Typically, the survey will end (students will no longer be able to submit responses) on the last day of classes.
  • Instructors will not be able to see survey results until after grades are due to be submitted to the Office of the Registrar.
  • After grades are due, instructors can access survey results and run reports.

Common Tasks

As an AEFIS administrator, there are some common tasks that you will need to perform. Review this list, and follow the links to any topics of interest.

Reviewing Survey Results & Running Reports

AEFIS provides convenient and powerful reporting tools. To further explore this functionality, check out the Reports Homepage (Admin), on the UW-Madison KnowledgeBase. 

Additional Resources