Frequently asked questions for Staff

There are a number of reasons why you cannot access your Teaching Evaluation Report:

1. You did not register for a teaching evaluation.
   You can only register for a teaching evaluation during the designated period (see Dates). The full sequence of steps must be carried out to complete the teaching registration. Staff are advised to verify that their teaching evaluation requests are listed on their eVALUate Summary page after registration.
2. There may be insufficient student responses.
   Teaching Evaluation Reports are only available when there is more than one student enrolled in a unit and where there is at least one student response for each teaching survey (to preserve student anonymity).
3. Your contract has expired.
   If your contract has expired, you will not be able to log-in to eVALUate directly. If you have activated your Curtin Staff Portal account before your contract expired, you can still retrieve your Teaching Evaluation Reports by accessing eVALUate from within the Staff Portal for up to 12 months post-employment.

For any unit, there can only be ONE Unit Coordinator in Curtin's Student One system. The Unit Coordinator details therein are imported into eVALUate on designated dates, whereupon the access to the eVALUate Full Unit Report is automatically set up.

Please contact your respective Faculty Student Services Office to see if you had been nominated as the Unit Coordinator.


There are a number of reasons why you cannot access your Full Unit Report:

• Your Head of School/Department may have nominated another person as the Unit Coordinator for the unit.
• More than one staff member is tasked with the joint coordination of the unit. Only one of them can be listed in Student One as the Unit Coordinator and given the corresponding access in eVALUate.
• The Unit Coordinator was updated in the Student One system after the designated cut-off date. Hence, the details were not imported to eVALUate for the access to be set up.

If you have undertaken the responsibilities of the primary Unit Coordinator during the study period, but have not been given the corresponding access in eVALUate, we will be able to set this up for you with authorisation from the Head of School/Department. Kindly ask your Head of School/Department to send us an email, advising that you were the Unit Coordinator of [please state the unit code and full name] for the required study period and year [e.g. Semester 1, 2016].

For example:

John Doe (Staff ID: 123456Z) was the Unit Coordinator for the unit ABCD1234 - Introductory Studies for the purpose of the 2016 Semester 1 eVALUate event.




Watch a short presentation here on the UC update in Student One and subsequent import to the eVALUate system:

It is not possible for us to give you access to the Full Unit Reports for study periods when you were not the Unit Coordinator.

You may wish to request for the Full Unit Reports from the previous Unit Coordinator or from the Head of School/Department. The quantitative results can be located using the Search report tools.

Unit Coordinators are required to share the appropriate results from the Full Unit Report with the unit's teaching team. (Refer to the Full Unit Report guidelines).

The quantitative results can be located using the Search report tools.

Currently, access to eVALUate Course Summary Reports is only provided to the Head of School/Department. There is no provision in the Student One system for Course Coordinator details. You will need to approach your Head of School/Department for the reports.

There are 3 different eVALUate reports you can access as a Head:

• Full Unit Report
• Course Summary Report
• Owning Organisation Unit Summary Report

There are a number of reasons why you cannot access your reports:

• The eVALUate Team has not been kept apprised of your appointment.
  We will contact the relevant Dean Teaching and Learning for confirmation before setting up your access.


• Retrospective access is not automatically set up. Please contact us if you need access to prior years' eVALUate reports, specifying the year(s) for which the access is required.
  

Unit Coordinators can download the Full Unit Report in a number of formats:

• As a full report with feedback from all students enrolled in the unit;
• Disaggregated by location or attendance mode - reports can be viewed separately by location (e.g. Bentley, Kalgoorlie, Miri) or by attendance mode (e.g. internal/online/external); and
• Disaggregated by response type - quantitative results can be downloaded separately so that Unit Coordinators can easily share the report

To edit qualitative comments, copy and paste all the comments from the Full Unit Report into a Word document. You can then use Word's editing tools (select, copy, delete) to remove any information, pertaining to individual teachers, from the version of the document which you intend to circulate to the whole teaching team. Students' comments which named individual teachers should be saved in separate documents and made available to only the staff member concerned. For further assistance, please contact us.

Full guidelines for interpreting and sharing the Full Unit Report are available online.

Student comments are sometimes very blunt and hurtful. Curtin Teaching and Learning has undertaken two research studies to determine the extent to which students use abusive or unprofessional comments (a departure from Curtin's Guiding Ethical Principles) and have published the findings. The research reveals that less than 0.03% of student comments were considered abusive or unprofessional.

Students are provided with numerous prompts online to be professional in their feedback and are also provided guidelines on how to give feedback.

Curtin has determined that, under no circumstances will a student comment be removed from the system and that student anonymity is assured.

It is helpful to determine the proportion of negative to positive comments when interpreting your report. This will assist you in determining if the comments are representative of the entire class or a small minority of students. Comments that reflect positively on teaching effectiveness can usually be considered genuine. Since the unit evaluation is anonymous, students do not usually write positive comments unless they mean them. As student anonymity is assured in the eVALUate system, students may write negative and unconstructive comments. Keep in mind that pressures unrelated to your unit may underlie some of these comments. Try to discern and glean any underlying message for the improvement of the unit from such comments. Abusive and unprofessional comments should be ignored (although this is not always easy).

Unit Coordinators may wish to share this excellent resource on managing student comments with their teaching team:
Cruel Student Comments: Seven Ways to Soothe the Sting

It is important to know that your Full Unit Report and hence the comments are only viewable by you as the Unit Coordinator and by the Head of School. Curtin strongly recommends that you speak to your new student cohort about eVALUate and the purpose of getting feedback from them (i.e. to improve their learning experience), and ask them to provide you with constructive feedback.

If there are comments in your TER that indicate that the student was not taught by you, the eVALUate team can generate a new Manual TER. Please contact us and provide us with your staff ID and name, the unit SPK number and name, and the campus(es) where you taught the unit.

The items within the teaching survey and the categorical scale have been rigorously tested to ensure they are valid and reliable. Hence no student responses of "unable to judge" are to be removed.

When a survey opens for student feedback, you can promote and educate students about eVALUate by using a brief slide show or an overhead transparency.

You can also read about other ways of improving response rates by logging in to the Staff reports section of eVALUate.

During an active survey, you can monitor the response rates to your unit surveys (for Unit Coordinators only) and/or number of responses to the teaching surveys (for teachers who have registered for feedback) on a daily basis by logging in to your eVALUate Summary page.

If your students are unsure of the online survey process, advise them to log in to the Staff Portal with their student-id and Curtin network password. They would be able to locate the online survey links within the eVALUate channel of the "my studies & evaluate" tab.

There are two ways of accessing eVALUate:

Via Curtin network account

When staff members become current on Curtin's HR system, a network account will be automatically created for them.

For any issues with the network account, kindly contact the staff members at CITS.

Once the account is ready, you will be able to login to the eVALUate Summary page.


Via the Curtin Staff Portal

Teachers (particularly those at offshore campuses who do not have a Curtin network account) are able to access eVALUate via the Curtin Staff Portal.

At the Curtin Staff Portal website, staff members will be able to request for assistance with Staff Portal-related queries by clicking on the relevant links:

• "Activate your account" if you have never used the Curtin Staff Portal before, or
• "Forgot your password?" if you are unable to log-in.

If you are still unsuccessful with the Curtin Staff Portal log-in, you will need to contact Curtin IT helpdesk via Service.Desk@curtin.edu.au.

eVALUate draws on the Human Resources system - ALESCO - to obtain the staff details.

If you would like a different name to appear in the eVALUate system and reports, you will need to contact Human Resources and ask them to change your preferred name in ALESCO. To do this, please send an email to alescohelpdesk@curtin.edu.au

Kindly note that the change will be applied retrospectively to the existing reports that you have access to.

The Unit Summary Report (USR) is published by default so that students have access to this report when it is released after an event and after all Boards of Examiners have met.

To add a response, unit coordinators can go to the eVALUate home page and log in to Staff.

This page includes a unit evaluation section which will indicate whether your unit is published or whether you have previously withdrawn the unit from publication.

•     Select and open the USR
•     Select 'Add a Response'
•     Type your response into the text box
•     Submit response

The USR and your response will automatically be published and students will be able to view this response on the following day.

We have increased the number of characters for unit coordinators to respond to students a number of times since eVALUate started. Unfortunately, we will not be increasing this any further due to system constraints and data storage limitations.

Kindly note that special characters and formatting (such as bullets, tables or line spacings) take up more character space, and removing these may be of help.

All teachers are able to request and lodge teaching evaluation requests online unless their unit is not included in an eVALUate event. The eVALUate team is not able to do this on your behalf as you need to log-in to make the request and to retrieve the report at a later stage. Please follow the online instructions to make a request.

To request a teaching registration, log in at:

• eVALUate Request teaching evaluation page;
• or the Curtin Staff Portal, and proceed as follows:
  1. click on the "Curtin links" in the top right hand corner drop-down menu
  2. click on the "Learning and Teaching" tab
  3. click on eVALUate
  4. click on Request teaching evaluation page

If you encounter any log-in issues, kindly refer to the FAQ on this.

Follow the online instructions to make a request. You must complete the full sequence of steps to carry out the registration.

You can view the status of your teaching registration by going to your eVALUate summary page.


Watch a short presentation here on Teaching Registration:

Update: Communications via broadcast messages have been replaced by Curtin Weekly.



If you have any questions, kindly contact the eVALUate Team.

Teaching evaluations do not happen automatically for two reasons. The first is that there is no central record at Curtin matching staff to which unit(s) they teach in. The second is that there was a teaching evaluation for all staff in all units in all study periods automatically, there would be surveys for staff who do not want feedback about their teaching and students giving feedback that isn't wanted. There would also be so many surveys for students to complete that response rates would suffer. It's also necessary to have a Curtin log-in to retrieve Teaching Evaluation Reports, so having to log-in to request a teaching evaluation ensures that this prerequisite (of having log-in credentials) is met.

The eVALUate surveys have undergone rigorous statistical testing to ensure validity of the items and the scale (including the UJ category of the scale).  Repeated testing was undertaken to ensure clarity and interpretation of the survey items and scales by students and staff.  As a consequence, three other Australian universities have now taken up eVALUate and use our surveys.

The Unable to Judge response is seldom used by students, however we continue to monitor and test the scale to ensure it continues to provide Curtin with information for quality improvement.  The meaning of this scale is as intended – students can select UJ when they are unable to agree or disagree with the item.  It may be that the students neither agree nor disagree (ie. they are responding neutrally as if there was a midpoint of neither agree or disagree because they cannot decide one way or another), or that they did not experience what is being measured.  At the overall level, the eVALUate unit survey item which has the highest percentage UJ is Item 5 (Feedback).  An analysis of the qualitative comments, provided by students who had selected UJ, showed that they often received no feedback at all, or that it was meaningless.

Research also shows that without a “neither agree or disagree” option in the scale, the percentage Agreement is higher than it would be if there was a “neither agree or disagree” option. 

For further information about the validity of the surveys, please refer to our peer reviewed journal articles in the publications section of our website:  https://evaluate.curtin.edu.au/publications/.

For further information about overall results, please refer to the University Aggregated Report: https://evaluate.curtin.edu.au/staff/uni_report.cfm

Research has been undertaken to determine which demographic groups participate in eVALUate (published each semester in the eVALUate University Aggregated Report). There is usually greater participation by female students, international students, and students with a higher semester-weighted average. Females are more likely to agree with the quantitative items, as are part-time students, international students, students in older age groups and students with a higher semester-weighted average.

About two thirds of the participating students provide written comments, and their responses are often quite lengthy. Students tend to comment more frequently about the best aspects of a unit than about how the unit can be improved. In the six things that students say most commonly about the best aspects, three of them are about staff - their quality and attitude, accessibility and responsiveness, and their teaching skills. These findings are stable since 2005.

Curtin uses a number of surveys to gather data about the student experience. The data are used routinely as part of Curtin's ongoing quality assurance process and are also used to support scholarship in teaching. Completion of an eVALUate instrument or participation in an evaluation process is taken as consent by students to the use of the data provided for these processes.

Before conducting research that includes data collected from student evaluation surveys, you must receive approval from the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC). HREC approval should be sought prior to the commencement of the evaluation where the results are to be used as part of a research degree or where there is an intention to publish or present the results at a public forum.

When reporting eVALUate data, the quantitative items in the unit and teaching surveys should only be reported as percentage agreement with individual quantitative items. For advice on statistical analysis please contact evaluate@curtin.edu.au.