Course Evaluations

Continuously collecting informal feedback plays an important role in faculty and students co-creating their learning environment. Additionally, as students complete a course, they will have an opportunity to provide formal feedback on the course and their instructor. NLU partners with Campus Labs to use IDEA surveys as our primary course feedback tool.

IDEA Surveys

Collecting anonymous feedback from students is an excellent way to grow as an instructor. NLU facilitates this feedback process via the IDEA survey. IDEA results can help you identify opportunities for improvements to your course, including suggestions for teaching methods that you might employ to improve the course. IDEA reports are also used at the college and institutional level in formal and informal faculty evaluation processes.

Visit the IDEA Faculty Portal to find links to an IDEA survey for each of your courses. It is recommended to share these links with your students via D2L announcement and email. Here is a sample IDEA email to send students.

IDEA Feedback Tool

Feedback is a tool within the IDEA dashboard that allows faculty to receive formative feedback from students throughout the term/semester, as often as once per day. Faculty have the ability to start a Feedback session in which their students will answer six questions related to high impact teaching practices and a single question that gauges the students overall understanding of the material that was covered.

Feedback session results allow faculty to identify trends in student perceptions of their instruction and make improvements as soon as the next class. Feedback questions are based on IDEA’s Teaching Essential form which was designed to provide formative feedback about teaching methods highly correlated with faculty and course excellence.

Here's an IDEA Feedback Tool email template you can use to communicate with students.

Reminders for Students:

Students will use the link provided by their instructor.
They can use their mobile device, computer, or tablet - without needing to download an app.
The feedback tool will only be open for two hours, so they should try to complete it as soon as they receive it, ideally during class.

Here are the questions that students are asked when the Feedback tool is launched.