This fall, DePaul will introduce OTE-Blue, a new online evaluation system. A sample of the new OTE-Blue report format is available on the Teaching Commons.
Student evaluations of teaching are an important part of the assessment of faculty and courses at DePaul. For the past 10 years, DePaul relied on an online system, the Online Teaching Evaluation, developed in-house by Information Services. This fall, DePaul will retire the current evaluation system and introduce OTE-Blue. Faculty will receive an email from OTE-Blue on Oct. 23 to begin interactions with the new system.
Provided by eXplorance, OTE-Blue offers added flexibility, ease of use for faculty and students, and several desired features. A seamless solution to address multi-instructor taught courses and a single, comprehensive report for each course are two examples.
The new system maintains all essential features of the original OTE. Instruments used for evaluations are the same and remain under control of local academic units. Evaluation periods for students are the same, starting at the beginning of week nine for regular quarter-long courses and week 14 for semester-long courses, and ending on a date set by local academic units. Faculty have the ability to add up to five customized questions for formative feedback.
The results of the customized questions
will be available exclusively to the faculty, as they were in the old OTE system. OTE-Blue opens for customized questions two weeks ahead of the student evaluation period, alerting faculty via email and with a message on D2L. Detailed instructions on how to add questions in OTE-Blue can be
found here.
Once the evaluations are completed, OTE-Blue combines the results into one single compact report for each class. Previously, all the data was made available through multiple reports - such as the statistical report, frequency report and the open-ended report.
A sample of the new report format is available on the Teaching Commons.