Description
The Office of Information Technology (OIT) has developed a Power BI report dashboard to provide instructors and academic leadership with access to more robust reporting of evaluation data. Instructors and college SET administrators will continue to receive the automated reports emails from Blue for individual course results and department/college reports in the days after final grades are submitted. The following week, the dashboard will be refreshed with the latest semester's evaluation data to allow for more customized analysis beyond what is possible with the static PDF reports.
Environment
Power BI on the web
Student Evaluations of Teaching Dashboard
Accessing the dashboard
- The first time you access the dashboard, you will need to use the direct link to 'install' the Student Evaluations of Teaching Dashboard app in your Power BI reports (does not install anything on your device). This link is also shared with instructors in automated report notification emails received from Blue (servicedesk@ohio.edu) after the evaluation period ends and term grades are submitted.
- After your first time accessing the dashboard, you may continue to use the direct link, or you can open the dashboard from the Power BI site:
- Once you've signed into Power BI with your Ohio account, select Apps from the menu along the left, and then select the Student Evaluations of Teaching Dashboard app in your Power BI Apps list.
- Changes to Blue or SET Dashboard access, such as adding, removing, or modifying user permissions, should be submitted to the Tech Help Center or servicedesk@ohio.edu by a representative of the office of the dean and include the user’s name, Ohio email address, and the specific access change required.
Navigating the dashboard
- Use the menu along the left to navigate between the pages of the dashboard. The pages you see depend on your role(s), e.g. instructor, SET administrator, or academic leadership. All users will see the Welcome page.
- If you have taught classes in the last few years, you will see the Instructor Pages, which include Summary, Analysis, and Comments pages.
- If you are an SET administrator or a member of academic leadership (deans, chairs, directors), you will see the Admin Pages section, which includes the Summary, Analysis, Comments and Admin Details pages. If you have recently been an instructor of record, you may see both the Instructor and Admin pages.
- The Admin Pages section includes the same pages as the Instructor Pages section, but with the additon of the Admin Details page, which allows SET administrators and academic leadership select multiple course sections and produce combined data.
- Welcome is a landing page with some basic information about the dashboard and navigation instructions.
- Summary displays response rates and overall averages for courses and terms, including how averages trend over time.
- Analysis displays the same metrics as the Summary page, but allows more customization in the view, as well as the ability to drill down to view metrics on the question level.
- Comments displays student responses to open-ended evaluation questions.
- Admin Details is the only page that instructor-users do not see. This page displays response option rate, number of responses, and mean score for each question on the evaluation form and allows administrators to select multiple courses to produce combined data, including data for courses that did not meet the enrollment threshold (as long as the combination of classes does meet the enrollment threshold).
Operating the dashboard
- On all of the pages in the dashboard, you'll find various drop-down menus, which are called slicers, that you can use to filter the displayed data.
- The available slicers include the following variables:
- Term (only terms evaluated in Blue, does not include historical data collected with other evaluation platforms)
- Campus
- College
- Department
- Career (graduate or undergraduate course)
- Component (course type)
- Delivery Type (in-person or online)
- Instructor Name (can only be filtered by academic leadership or SET administrators)
- Class
- Question Section
- Question
- Note that, depending on your level of access, you may not have options for all visible slicers.
- By default, only data for the most recent term is displayed; data for additional terms can be selected with the Term slicer.
- If you do not see a course as an option in the Class slicer, the evaluation did not receive any responses.
- The slicers are 'sticky,' so when you return to the dashboard, the options selected during your previous session are still in place.
- If you are seeing unexpected values in the data or in the slicer options, select the Clear all slicers button at the top right of the dashboard (outlined with orange in the image below) to reset all of the slicers and start again. If you continue to see unexpected data, please reach out for assistance at servicedesk@ohio.edu.
- On the Analysis page, you can customize the columns (metrics) and rows (demographics) that appear in the data table using the check boxes on the far right of the page:
- To expand all rows in a data table, right-click on the column name (e.g. Instructor, Catalog/Subject #, Question Section) and select Expand to next level. If another level of expansion is required (e.g. to expand all of the instructor names to reveal all courses, then to expand all courses to reveal all sections), repeat the steps: right-click on the column name and select Expand to next level. Note, if all available levels have been expanded, the Expand to next level option will not be available in the right-click menu.
- To minimize all rows, right-click on the column name and select Drill up. Repeat as necessary. Note that the Drill up option will not appear in the menu if rows are minimized to the top level.
Response Rates
- Response rates can be found on the Summary page.
- The overall response rate for all displayed courses is found in the green boxes at the left of the page (below).
- Response rates for individual courses are in the Survey Response Rate column at the far right of the data table (below).
Exporting
- To export data from the dashboard, do not use the Export option at the very top of the page (outlined and crossed out with red in the image below).
- Instead, export displayed data by hovering over the desired data visual (e.g. the table in the middle of the page) and selecting the More Options ellipsis (...) in the upper right of the frame (outlined with red in the image below), then choose Export Data.
- Note that the More Options ellipsis (...), shown below, is only visible while the mouse is hovering over the data visual.
- There are two options when exporting data from the dashboard:
- Data with current layout option only offers the XLSX file type and includes just the data that is shown in the data visualization that you are exporting.
- Summarized data option allows you to choose from XLSX and CSV file formats and includes a summary of the data that was used to compose the data visualization that you are exporting.
Combining course sections (administrators only)
- To protect student anonymity, faculty are not able to view data in the dashboard for class sections with fewer than five students, even when combined with larger sections. Faculty should contact their college SET administrators for support with combining eligible course sections (i.e. multi-section courses that are taught together) in the reporting dashboard.
- Administrators have the ability to select multiple course sections to provide combined data in more granular detail than found in Blue's distributed department reports by using the Admin Details page of the dashboard.
- To display the combined data for multiple sections on the Admin Details page:
- Using the Class slicer, enable the check box next to each of the particular classes/sections you wish to combine.
- Expand the display to include individual class sections by selecting the 'v' icons (outlined with pink below).
- While this functionality allows small sections to be combined to share data when the total enrollment for the sections meets or exceeds five students, we do not recommend combining small enrollment classes that are unrelated.
- This feature should not be used for low-enrollment sections that are not conducted as a multi-section delivery and/or for classes taught by different instructors, unless you're looking for a department- or college-wide report.
- Only combine small enrollment sections with classes that are taught together by the same instructor(s).
- For example, combining a graduate section with two students enrolled that was delivered synchronously with an undergraduate section that had 15 students enrolled will allow the instructor to see the data for those two graduate students aggregated with the data for the 15 undergraduate students.
- Note that the Summary page will only display the overall combined response rate, not the means. You can see the response means on the Admin Details page when the combined enrollment is five or greater.
Considerations
- Responses to open-ended questions that exceed 4,000 characters will not be displayed on the Comments page in the dashboard.
- Student comments that exceed 4,000 characters (of which there have been fewer than ten between summer 2025 and the Blue implementation in spring 2022) continue to be available in the course and department results reports that Blue automatically distributes by email to instructors and evaluation administrators.
- You can access Blue directly anytime at https://my-ohio.bluera.com/ to review past reports or monitor response rates for ongoing evaluations.
- To protect student anonymity, data for individual or multiple combined class sections with fewer than five enrollments will not display in the dashboard. If slicers are selected for individual or combined sections with fewer than five total students enrolled, the dashboard will be blank.
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Additional resources