Course Evaluations

[GwendolynRaubol]

I am the administrator for the course evaluations at TMCC. We use Watermark Insights Course Evaluations & Surveys. Our instructors are able to view their course evals in Canvas. However, I've had several instructors who cannot see the link to view their course evaluations. 

Once in a while, I will have an instructor who cannot see their course evals and it's usually because they have multiple usernames in the system (they had a name change or took a class and are now an instructor). I have been able to merge the accounts and the problem is fixed. 

However, I've had several instructors at the end of Spring 2023 semester who have been able to see their evals in the past, but suddenly cannot see their evlas. They've not had a name change or have multiple user names. I put in a ticket with Watermark, but their support team has not been able to solve the issue so far.

Has this happened for anyone else? What was the issue? How did you fix it? Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[chriscas]

Hi @GwendolynRaubol,

We use Watermark CES (formerly EvaluationKit) here as well, and I'm the admin for both Canvas and Watermark CES.  I can say that we have not had these problems at all, and we've has the system since late 2014.  I think you may have hit the nail on the head with username inconsistencies though.  If a user's login, email, or sis_id changes, it can cause havok in 3rd party integrations depending what data they are using to identify a user.  This probably isn't a short-term solution, but I'd really recommend doing whatever you can to minimize or eliminate username changes for your faculty and students.  I know there are situations where users want their usernames to change (marriage being a big one), but sometimes the headaches these changes can cause just aren't worth it.  Watermark specifically checks a user's role before making the Course Evaluations menu available, and I don't believe the menu will show for a Canvas user who has no evaluations in Watermark under their current login.  Maybe Watermark can give you a solution for this, but I imagine there could be a lot of manual work involved to get usernames in sync between Canvas and Watermark at this point.

I hope this helps a bit even though it may not be a complete answer for you.

-Chris

[JessicaDeanSVC]

Hi there! We also use CES integrated with Canvas, and our college has run into issues with this as well over the past few months. What we have found is that for some reason, it is defaulting to the student view for instructors. They need to look for the “Student/Respondent” option at the top and select either of the “Instructor” options to see the questionnaire results.

We've been in communication with CES on this for about two months, as well as other schools in our system who have been experiencing issues. The issue for us appeared after we did the LTI 1.3 integration.