Summary
This guide is an overview of the online student evaluation of teaching system, Blue, for academic leaders, including deans, department chairs, and program directors, and its purpose is to provide guidance for accessing Blue and evaluation data, including the Student Evaluations of Teaching Dashboard in Power BI.
Body
Table of Contents
Introduction
This guide is intended to provide academic leaders, including deans, department chairs, and program directors, as well as any staff charged with leading student evaluation of teaching (SET) activities in their college, school, department, or program. The technical coordination of SETs at the unit level is handled by college SET administrators using Blue, the university’s online evaluation platform. Office of Information Technology (OIT) staff supports the university-wide administration of Blue and provides technical support for students, faculty, and staff.
Faculty Senate and the Provost's working group for Student and Peer Evaluations of Teaching recommended changes that take effect for the fall 2025 semester. For more information about all changes, review the Student Guidelines Report from the working group.
Below you'll find a brief overview of the SET process, as well as information about how you can access and use evaluation data.
Overview of the evaluation process
Scope
All for-credit courses with at least one student enrollment will be evaluated, except those tutorials for which the catalog number is appended by a T (e.g. 3450T) and Heritage College of Medicine classes.
Evaluation period
- Courses that run for seven weeks or longer
- Starts at 8:00 AM two weeks before the course end date
- Ends at 11:59 PM one week before the course end date
- Courses that run for six weeks or shorter
- Starts at 8:00 AM five days before the course end date
- Ends at 11:59 PM on the course end date
Notifications
- Instructors and students receive an email when the survey launches, as well as two reminder emails during the data collection period.
- Students stop receiving reminders once they've submitted a response.
- Instructors can monitor response rate during the evaluation period, as well as send additional reminder emails.
Results
- Reports are sent out by email to instructors and college SET administrators after grades are due for the full term.
- This includes reports for courses that run less than fifteen weeks (e.g. first summer session courses will not receive reports until after second and full sessions grades are submitted).
- Evaluation results reports are only generated for courses with at least five students enrolled and for which at least one evaluation response was submitted.
- The response data for courses that do not meet the thresholds is included in the aggregated department reports that are received by college SET administrators.
- Results are added to the Student Evaluations of Teaching Dashboard in Power BI the week following report distributions.
Accessing reports
- Blue automatically generates reports for classes that meet the enrollment and response thresholds, then distributes the reports to instructors and college SET administrators after all final grades are submitted.
- Academic leaders should contact their college SET administrators to obtain Blue-generated course and/or department reports.
- Additional data visualizations are available via the Student Evaluations of Teaching Dashboard in Power BI.
Student Evaluations of Teaching Dashboard
The Office of Information Technology (OIT) has developed a Power BI 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 reports.
Accessing the dashboard
- The first time you access the dashboard, you will need to use a direct link to 'install' the Student Evaluations of Teaching Dashboard app in your Power BI reports (does not install anything on your device). The link is also provided in the automated report notification emails college SET administrators receive from Blue (servicedesk@ohio.edu) after the evaluation period ends and term grades are submitted.
- For subsequent visits to the dashboard, you may continue to use the direct link, create a bookmark, 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 an associate dean and include the user’s name, Ohio email address, and the specific access change required.
Operating the dashboard
For details about using the dashboard, review the Navigating the Student Evaluations of Teaching Dashboard (Power BI) help article.
Considerations
- Responses to open-ended questions are not currently displayed on the dashboard, but will be added by the time the dashboard is refreshed with data from the fall 2025 evaluation period, the week after final grades are submitted. Student comments continue to be available in the individual course reports that Blue automatically distributes by email to instructors and college SET administrators.
- To protect student anonymity, data for class sections with fewer than five enrollments will not display in the dashboard. If slicer options are selected for individual or combined sections with fewer than five total students enrolled, the dashboard will be blank.
- 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 Pages section of the dashboard. More details about combining courses are found in the Navigating the Student Evaluations of Teaching Dashboard (Power BI) help article.
Get help from OIT
Additional resources