What Survey Instruments Are Used?
There are 6 common questions that form the basis of the online teaching evaluation (OTE) administered via DePaul’s survey system, OTE Blue. Beyond those 6 questions, each academic unit can add customized questions, and individual faculty can also add customized questions.
The general structure of the OTE consists of
- Common University questions
- College questions (if any)
- Department questions (if any)
- Program questions (if any)
- Up to 5 additional questions per course, customized by each individual faculty member.
Common University Questions
College, Department, and Program Questions
These questions are created at the local academic unit level. Information about these questions can be obtained from the College offices, Department offices, and/or Program directors.
Adding Your Own Questions
Each faculty member can add up to 5 questions to the OTE of each of their classes. You can add Likert scale questions or open-ended questions. Likert scale questions must utilize pre-populated scales. If you do not find an appropriate scale in the system for your questions, please contact
ote@depaul.edu. Learn how to add questions by downloading and reading this PDF.
You will receive an email from OTE Blue at the beginning of Week 7 in the quarter (beginning of week 13 for the College of Law) announcing that the system is open for your customization. During the regular academic year, you will have two weeks to add your questions to the OTE; you will have one week during Summer sessions.
You are encouraged to think about your questions carefully before logging in to OTE Blue. Preparing questions in a separate text document and copy-pasting them into OTE Blue is easier and faster.
If you need inspiration for what kinds of questions you might want to ask, review a list of questions to consider asking your students.
How to Conduct Online Teaching Evaluations
OTEs at DePaul are conducted entirely online and are available to students via mobile devices. To help raise rates of return, the Academic Affairs policy governing online teaching evaluations was updated in January 2023 to ask that faculty provide course time for students to complete OTEs.
In the interest of eliminating potential bias in the results, instructors should not offer students incentives of any kind for completing the evaluations.
Here are some recommendations on how to conduct the OTE process, according to the policy developed by Academic Affairs and endorsed by Faculty Council:
Directing Students to OTEs
All students receive an initial email and follow-up reminders to complete OTEs during the last two weeks of the quarter.
All students see a link to Course Evaluations in their main navigation bar upon logging in to D2L.
Selecting
Course Evaluations takes the student to a list of all evaluations they need to complete.
All students see a pop-up reminder about OTEs that need to be completed when they log in to D2L. They will see this pop-up until they complete all their OTEs or until the OTE period ends.
You can also provide a direct link to OTE Blue within your D2L course site:
- Select
Content in the course navigation bar.
- Go to the module where a link to your Course Evaluation should be added.
- Select Existing Activities.
- Select External Learning Tools.
- Select
Course Evaluations.
Once the link to Course Evaluations has been added, you may want to take two additional steps:
Set a due date for the OTE and
add descriptive text to provide context for the importance and impact of OTEs.
For Courses with On-Campus Class Meetings
- Alert students in advance of the scheduled day for the OTE, so that they can plan to bring a mobile device to class. Faculty may want to include this information in their syllabi.
- Plan at least 15 minutes for the OTE.
- To share instructions with students, use the computer in your classroom to display the Course Evaluations link on the D2L homepage or the link you’ve created in your own D2L course site.
- Encourage students without a mobile device to find a publicly available DePaul computer to complete the OTE.
- Leave the room while students are completing the OTE.
For Courses with Online Synchronous Class Meetings (likely on Zoom)
- Alert students in advance of the scheduled day for the OTE. Faculty may want to include this information in their syllabi.
- Plan at least 15 minutes for the OTE.
- To share instructions with students, share your screen in Zoom to display the Course Evaluations link on the D2L homepage or the link you’ve created in your own D2L course site.
- Turn off your camera, and allow students to turn off their cameras, while OTEs are completed.
For Online: Asynchronous Courses
- Add a direct link to OTE Blue within the Content area of your D2L course site.
- Once the “Course Evaluation” link is created, add a deadline to that link so that students are reminded of this task in their course calendar.
- Remind students to complete the OTE as part of your regular course emails.
Accessing Online Teaching Evaluations as an Instructor
The system is accessible at ote.depaul.edu/blue or through dedicated links that you will receive in email messages from the system.
Format of Online Teaching Evaluation Reports
Results from OTEs are compiled in one single report, available to faculty 24 hours after they submit their grades for a specific class. Please note that there are no thresholds on the number of respondents to be met to trigger the generation of a report. A report is generated regardless of the number or rate of responses.
Reports can be accessed at
http://ote.depaul.edu/blue in the Reports section. You can
view an example report to help you get familiar with the new format.
Each class report opens with data on enrollment, responses received, and the resulting rate of response. Descriptive statistics of responses to the 6 university-wide questions are then presented. Individual class means and standard deviations are compared with College, Department, and/or Program data, where suitable. Frequency histograms for the 6 University questions come next, followed by comparison histogram where the individual class means for the 6 university questions are compared with the means across appropriate units (College and/or Department and/or Program).
The second major section presents descriptive statistics of responses to College questions (if any) and/or Department questions (if any) and/or Program questions (if any, divided into instructor focused questions and non-instructor questions). OTE Blue refers to the latter as “course questions”. Similar to the section on the University questions, descriptive statistics are followed by frequency histograms and comparison histograms.
The third section contains the results of the instructor customized questions (if any). The report concludes with the results of open-ended questions, first listed by question, and then listed by student respondent.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Resources