Questionnaire Structure

Concept

EvaP uses a modular system for assembling questionnaires for the evaluations. With this approach, it is easy to add questionnaires for new course types and at the same time allows comparing courses of different types due to shared questionnaires. The user is free to choose any topic when composing a new questionnaire, it does not need to be tied to a specific course type.

Questionnaire types

There are two questionnaire types:

• General questionnaires refer to a course in general, e.g. teaching materials and contents. They can either be placed above or below the contributor questionnaires.
• Contributor questionnaires refer to a contributor, e.g. a lecturer or teaching assistant.

Contributor questionnaires cannot be assigned as general questionnaires in an evaluation and vice versa.

Each questionnaire has a title and one or more questions.

Each course can have multiple general questionnaires assigned and to each contributor of a course, a different set of contributor questionnaires can be assigned (see Assignment)

Question types

There are multiple question types:

• Likert questions measure agreement/disagreement on a scale from 1 (complete agreement) to 5 (complete disagreement)
• Grade questions are similar to likert questions but use school grades from 1 (best) to 5 (worst) instead of agreement levels
• Yes/no questions have "yes" and "no" as possible answer options. Either option can be defined to be the positive value depending on the question.
• Bipolar questions have two poles (e.g., "too small"/"too large") each with three increments, placed on both sides of an "ideal" value, so these questions have 7 possible answers.
• Text questions can be answered in a text field. These text answers are reviewed by staff users before publishing.

For all non-text questions there is also the option to select a "no answer" field when evaluating. This might lead students to spend less thoughts on their answers, but was considered necessary nonetheless, because not everyone might be able to answer every question. Also, for all non-text questions the option "allow additional text answers" can be selected. This adds an optional text answer field for additional remarks to this question.

Questionnaire attributes

• Attributes that are shown to lecturers and managers to help with questionnaire assignment:
  • Name: A short name describing the main use of the questionnaire, e.g. "Lecture - teaching materials"
  • Description: A tooltip that is shown during assignment to provide a more detailed description of the questionnaire's contents.
• Attributes that are visible to students:
  • Public name/title: The title will be the headline of the questionnaire as shown to students.
  • Introduction: A short text shown below the headline that explains/introduces the questionnaire.
• Internal attributes:
  • Type: Either TOP/BOTTOM for general questionnaires shown before or after the contributor questionnaires or CONTRIBUTOR for contributor questionnaires.
  • Sorting index: Higher numbers make the questionnaire appear farther down the page. Useful to e.g. move general comment questions to the bottom of the page.
  • Obsolete: Hides the questionnaire in questionnaire selection widgets.

Questionnaire management

• Questionnaires can be deleted and edited only if they are not used for any course.
• To change existing questionnaires for use in a new evaluation, managers can copy the existing one and then modify the copy.