Course Evaluations System Replacement Project

Student evaluations serve as a central quality assurance mechanism and an essential channel for the student voice. This upgrade strengthens UQ’s commitment to delivering a high-quality learning experience, enhancing the student voice, and ensuring compliance with industry standards—ultimately driving continuous improvement.

The new platform offers several key benefits:

User Experience: Features a modern interface with an improved dashboard for easier navigation and enhanced search functionality.

Reliability: Offers better support and a more reliable system performance during peak evaluation periods.

Response Rate Monitoring: Enables real-time monitoring of response rates for Course Contributors and School/Faculty Executives.

Improved Data Quality: Mitigates data quality issues, leading to more accurate and reliable insights.

Improved Ease of Access: Each course now has a single survey link for students. Teaching staff have access to Subject Management, where they can view survey details, including response rates and QR codes. Reports list where they can access their semester survey results reports.

Streamlined Administration: Reduces administrative workload through simplified survey management, data preparation, and reporting.

Survey Questions: The current SECaT and SETutor survey questions remain unchanged.

Data entry in Jac or Syllabus Plus: Course-owning units continue to use Jac (and optionally Syllabus Plus) to enter and maintain course and teaching staff data (Course Coordinators, Lecturers, Tutors). This data will automatically feed into the new evaluation platform.

Evaluation Schedules: Standard evaluation schedules remain the same. For evaluations outside these schedules, schools can contact the Student Surveys and Evaluation Team (SSET).

Unified Survey Access: Students will now access both SECaT and SETutor surveys for a course via a single survey link or QR code, reducing confusion and improving engagement.

Reduced Manual Work for Course-Owning Units

The new platform removes the following manual steps, making the process easier for course-owning units:

• SECaT Verification: Don’t need to manually verify for SECaT surveys before they are created.
• SETutor Opt-in: Don’t need to manually opt-in for SETutor surveys.
• SETutor Survey Link: Don’t need to manually distribute SETutor survey links.

To facilitate a smooth transition, existing processes will remain unchanged wherever possible while leveraging the new platform’s benefits. This approach will enhance staff user experience and minimise disruptions.

Course-owning units should continue using Jac (or Syllabus Plus, as per their preference) to enter and maintain accurate course and teaching staff data. All Course Coordinator, Lecturer, and Tutor details that are accurately maintained will automatically integrate with the new evaluation platform.

Please note that only staff designated as Course Coordinators, Lecturers, or Tutors will be included in evaluations. For further details, please refer to the Evaluation Data Preparation Guide (PDF, 78 KB).

ADAs have appointed Faculty-based representatives as Change Champions to engage with course-owning units throughout the project. Please contact the Change Champion for your faculty if you have any questions.

The project team encourages you to actively engage in the upcoming stakeholder engagement sessions. Your insights will be invaluable in enhancing the University’s course evaluation platform.

Session details will be shared through ITaLI’s Teaching and eLearning newsletters throughout the semester.

Frequently asked questions for evaluation data preparation 

Q1. When should course and staff data be prepared? 

Course-owning units in schools and faculties must ensure that all course and staff data in Jac (or Syllabus Plus) is accurate by Census Date each semester. This ensures that surveys are correctly generated in the course evaluation platform. For more details, refer to the Evaluation data preparation guide. 

Q2.  Can a course be evaluated if its Course Profile is unpublished or retired? 

No. The Course Profile must be published in Jac using the Publish tile. If a Course Profile is unpublished or retired, surveys will not be generated for the course, even if it meets the minimum enrolment threshold (5 or more students). 

Q3. How do I ensure staff entered in Jac are evaluated? 

1. Staff must: 
   • Have a valid UQ User ID. 
   • Be assigned one of the following roles in the Course Contributor section of Jac: 
     • Course Coordinator 
     • Lecturer 
     • Tutor 
2. If the Course Coordinator also lectures in the same course, they must be assigned both roles. Staff assigned to other roles will not be evaluated. 

Q4. What if a staff member's UQ User ID or Role Title is missing in Course Profile (Jac) or Syllabus Plus? 

Staff members will not be included in course evaluations if they:

• do not have a valid UQ User ID, and/or 
• are not assigned a Course Coordinator, Lecturer, or Tutor role in Jac.

Q5. How should teaching roles be assigned or amended correctly in Jac? 

Staff must be assigned the correct role using the dropdown menu in the Course Contributor section of Jac.  

Surveys will not be generated for staff listed under "Other Roles" or that are added manually. 

Q6.  Will I receive SETutor evaluation if my School allocates tutors in Syllabus Plus? 

Yes. If your school assigns tutors at the tutorial activity level (TUT) in Syllabus Plus (S+), they will be automatically linked to the course in the evaluation platform. Continue managing tutor details in S+ as usual. 

Q7. Can a staff member receive both SECaT and SETutor evaluations for the same course? 

No. To avoid survey fatigue, staff receiving a SECaT evaluation (Course Coordinators and Lecturers) for a course will not receive a SETutor evaluation for the same course. 

If a staff member is assigned as both a Tutor and a Lecturer/Course Coordinator in a course, the SETutor survey will be automatically removed. 

Q8. Can the new system evaluate courses that are not delivered in a standard 13-week semester?  

Yes, the new system can evaluate courses delivered in non-standard teaching periods. 

However, to ensure a smooth system implementation, no surveys will be administered before 19 May 2025. 

If you plan to open a survey after 19 May 2025, please contact the Student Surveys and Evaluations Team at [email protected] for further information.  

Q9. When and how will staff receive course evaluation reports? 

If a survey receives five or more responses, the evaluation report will be emailed to staff on the Monday following final grade release. In Semester 1, 2025, this will be Monday 7 July 2025. 

The email will contain a link to the Feedback Report page, where staff can: 

• View results in HTML format. 
• Download a PDF version of the report.  

Staff can also log in to Reportal from 7 July 2025 to access evaluation results through various reports. 

Q10. How can I stay updated on the project, seek support, or raise questions? 

View the lastest updates and other project details in the other sections of this page.

Faculty-based Change Champions have been appointed to support course-owning units.

1. Please contact your faculty’s Change Champion for assistance.
2. You can find their names and contact details on this page.

Q11. Can a course be evaluated if it has fewer than 5 students enrolled? 

No. A minimum of five enrolled students is required for a survey to be generated. If your course has fewer than five students enrolled, we recommend using one of the informal feedback tools to collect feedback from your students. Review the Informal student feedback page for further information and guidelines.

Q12. Can staff requests their course to be exempted from evaluations? 

Courses to be exempted are currently managed by the Change Champions, and exemptions must be approved by Associate Dean (Academic). Please contact Student Surveys and Evaluations Team at [email protected] for guidance.

Q13. I am a Course Coordinator (or a Lecturer) on a one-on-one supervision-based course, for example, Thesis/Dissertation/Research Project, will this course be exempted from evaluations?  

Yes. Thesis, Dissertation and other one-on-one supervision based courses will be exempted from course teaching feedback. The exemption process is managed by Change Champions with Associate Dean, Academic at Faculty level.  

Some Faculties have alternative arrangements in place for Thesis, Dissertation and other one-on-one supervision based courses. Please consult Change Champions in your Faculty directly. 

Q14. Upon receiving reports, can staff request comment redaction if it contains abusive, malicious, or dissimilatory language?  

Yes. The process for redacting or removing abusive malicious and dissimilatory comments is outlined in Paragraph 37 to 38 of the Procedure.  

To manage this process more efficiently, we recommend such a request with the approval from Pro Vice Chancellor, Education and Student Experience to be submitted to Student Surveys and Evaluations Team (SSET) by the dates outlined in the table below.  

Requests to redact or remove a comment after the scheduled timeline, may be managed by exception, in consultation with ITaLI Director. 

Q15. I coordinate/teach a course with In-Person and External modes. One of these modes has fewer than 4 students enrolled. Do I need to request to merge In-Person and External modes to be merged?  

No. You don’t need to request to merge In-Person and External modes anymore.  

To keep a consistent practice since merging surveys started in Semester 1, 2020, the system will automatically merge surveys when one mode of the same course (by Course Code in Si-Net) has fewer than 4 students enrolled. After the survey has closed, the system generates a group (“GRP”) survey ID to indicated that that report combined responses from In-Person and External modes together. The report cannot disaggregate/separate responses received from either mode.   

When there are 5 or more students enrolled in both In-Person and External modes for the same course (by Course Code in Si-Net), the survey won’t be merged, and the report will be generated based on In-Person and External modes, respectively, where each mode receives 5 or more responses.  

Q16. Where can I access QR code for In-Person and External classes?  

Course Coordinators and Lecturers can access and download the QR code and survey link via Subject Management for In-Person and External modes, respectively.   

Q17. I coordinate/teach “multi-badge” courses with UG and PG cohorts. Can I merge these two courses’ survey together?  

Multi-badge courses are manually linked in Learn.UQ. From Si-Net, Undergraduate (UG) and Postgraduate (PG) cohorts are enrolled in two different courses (by course code). For this reason, these two independent courses cannot be merged.  

When you receive the survey open notification, please login to Subject Management and access/download QR codes for UG and PG, respectively.  

Please ensure that you are listed as a Course Coordinator (or Lecturer) in both Course Profiles (Jac), so UG and PG cohorts can provide feedback to the correct staff.  

Q18. Can I retrieve evaluation reports and results from the previous evaluation system?  

Responses collected from the previous platform will not be retrieved in the new evaluation system. Staff can access all evaluation results via existing reports in Reportal. 

Q19. What types of report do I have access in the evaluation system?  

The types of reports staff can access in the evaluation system is subject to the staff member’s role in a course. Please refer to the Table below for details. 

Q20. Why “Threshold Status” shows “Met” but my teaching/tutor reports display a message as “this survey did not meet the threshold of 5 responses”?

When a course survey receives 5 responses, “Threshold Status” will display “Met” in course report, as well as related teaching and tutor reports.

The message “this survey did not meet the threshold of 5 responses” indicates that your individual teaching/tutor survey received fewer than 5 responses, and no results can be generated to display. The number of responses is displayed as “Responses Received” on the upper right corner of the cover page.

To mitigate the risk, please engage students more proactively by asking them to select lecturers and tutors correctly in the selection page, reminding them to submit all surveys before the closing date. This ensures that sufficient responses are received for all parts of a course teaching feedback survey.

Q21. I have specific accessibility requirements. What accessibility features are available in the new Course Evaluations System (Blue)?

The new Course Evaluations System includes a range of accessibility features designed to support an inclusive user experience. For more details regarding specific accessibility features, or if you encounter any difficulties using the system, please contact the Student Surveys and Evaluations Team at [email protected] for assistance.

Q22. Can staff images be added to allow students to view staff when providing feedback?

At this point in time, the platform does not allow the uploading of individual images by users. The addition of images is only possible via integration from a single data source.

With regards to single data source, currently, UQ does not have a central repository for staff images, and it is therefore not possible for staff images to be included in surveys. If in the future UQ develops a central source for staff member images, it will be possible to have images attached to feedback forms.

Q23. Will a flexible feedback schedule be available?

For the first survey period in the new platform (Semester 1, 2025) it is not possible to change the survey start date.  Please contact SSET if you have intensively taught courses in Semester 2, 2025.

Q24. Are staff able to monitor response rates during the survey period?

During the survey period, response rates can be monitored via Subject Management. For assistance with accessing Subject Management please refer to the Staff User Guide.

Q25. During the survey period, can response rates be shared with students to encourage participation?

Yes, response rates can be shared with students to encourage participation.  When sharing response rates, we recommend advising students that data underpinning response rates is confidential, and it is not possible to see who has/has not responded.

Q26. Will staff still read malicious, discriminatory, and abusive comments? 

Staff well-being and psychological safety is of most importance at UQ.

The language scan process remains unchanged with the implementation of the new survey platform. The Student Surveys and Evaluations team will continue to conduct language scans of all qualitative data to identify and remove malicious, discriminatory, and abusive comments. However, we do understand the procedure is not perfect and, in some instances, these comments may remain on reports distributed.  

If you identify comments that are abusive, malicious, discriminatory, or breaches the Student Code of Conduct, Student Integrity and Misconduct Policy, please refer to the Student Evaluation of Course and Teaching Procedure (paragraph 37) for instructions on how to request redaction or removal of comments.  We recommend to submit your request before Census date of the following Semester.

Q27. For courses that have a large teaching team, are all teaching team members visible to students?

Yes, all teaching members for a course, which are properly listed in Jac/ Syllabus+ are visible to students.  When providing feedback, students can select as many teaching staff as they wish to provide feedback for. However, they are encouraged to only submit feedback for staff that taught them throughout the semester.

Q28. Would it be possible to send students information on how to provide constructive feedback?

Survey invitation and reminder emails have been prepared in accordance with UQ marketing guidelines. Guidance for providing constructive feedback can be found on the My.UQ evaluate my course and teaching page.

Q29. Is the new platform easy to use on mobile devices?

The new system is designed with students in mind, and the student interface is very mobile friendly. Staff interface – Subject Management, is also available on mobile devices, however, is best viewed using a laptop or PC with a larger screen.   

Included below are brief demos of the new course evaluation system, one tailored for staff and the other for students. Each of the recordings has been prepared for the purpose of supporting each user group through User Acceptance Testing. Pending feedback from User Acceptance Testing, items contained in the recording may be subject to change. Prior to system go-live, updated demos will be available based on the final version of the course evaluation system. 

Student and staff demo

Watch how to navigate the course teaching feedback system (UQ staff login required)