Course Evaluations and Surveys (CES) offers a fully hosted online course evaluation and survey system designed to streamline the entire student feedback process for our campus. These directions are for Course Evaluations and Surveys Admins (departmental secretaries, chairs, and deans) to manage CES Projects.

In CES, Surveys refer to the evaluation questions. Projects refer to the semester course evaluation deployments (Response Periods in Blackboard Enterprise Surveys). The Main surveys will be created by the Institutional Effectiveness and Planning Office who will also import all of the semester courses into the project and set the deployment dates and email settings for the students and instructors.  

Target Surveys are School, Department or Program-level surveys that can be deployed to ALL courses of a hierarchy level, i.e., SNSS, or with a specific course code(s), i.e., PSY.  Approved Target Surveys will also be deployed automatically by Institutional Effectiveness and Planning each semester. 

A prior service request to set up or change an existing Target Survey must be made a minimum of one month prior to the actual deployment date. Service requests can be made much earlier (recommended). Service requests for changes, general questions, and support can be made at the Information Technology (IT) Self-Service Portal by a departmental representative (or by a dean for the whole school).

Checking Courses and Instructors

Accessing CES

• Login via Blackboard: https://buffalostate.open.suny.edu (or find the link under “Toolbox” on the MYBUFFSTATE page).
• Locate the CES module on the Blackboard landing page. 

Check Course Enrollments

Prior to course evaluation deployment, each department is instructed to check course enrollments.  This is to ensure that the correct courses, instructors, and students will be included in course evaluations.  Course information is pulled into CES via Blackboard at the beginning of the semester and, often, there are changes that do not make it into the CES module.  In addition, there are times additional people are added as “Instructor” to a course in Blackboard that should not be included in the course evaluation project. 

• Under the “Manage Courses” module, select the Project name.

• Click the + icon under View (to view details and review the list of courses that the project will deploy to).

• CES Admins (departmental secretaries/chairs) will only have access to their hierarchy (departmental) level.
• Access Start & End dates are for Node Admins and not the instructors.
• A list of courses, students, and instructors will be displayed (students & instructors may be counted multiple times if they are enrolled in more than one course).

• Review the Project Courses list for any missing courses, instructors, and/or teaching assistants. All courses listed will receive the all-college Main Project questions.
   
• Note that a course that only has 1 student will still have their anonymity protected. Instructors will not receive results for courses where Respondents are less than 3 but the department can compile an aggregate result of these courses. 
  • Click the Code header label to sort the course list in ascending or descending order.
  • Courses may be listed on multiple pages. At the bottom of the page, change Records per page > 500.

• You can Search Courses by Course Code, Instructor Names, etc. You can click Edit to view Project Deployment Dates. 
• Review the column labeled Instructors as well as the column labeled Students.

• Click on the number. A new window will open showing enrolled instructors/students.

Add or Remove Instructors

Normally, you do not need to manually add instructors to a course. This would only be done if multiple instructors were sharing different courses and desired a course evaluation. In most cases, having instructors listed as co-teachers in Banner will result in them receiving the appropriate course evaluations.  You may need to remove instructors if they have been added in Bb for administrative purposes.

• From the pop-up window, select the instructor to be removed > click Unenroll Selected Users > click OK on the confirmation window.

• If this is a team-taught course, you can leave both instructors enrolled.
• Make sure that you really want to remove the instructor. There is no undelete!
• Note: CES Admins do not have the permission level to remove students.  If you need to remove students, please submit an IT ticket or email Institutional Effectiveness and Planning at fuzaktd@buffalostate.edu.
• To add instructors and/or students, Under the “Manage Courses” module, select the Project name.  Under Enrollments, locate the desired course > click the + icon.

• A new pop-up window will appear. Search by username (network name or the beginning of their email). Leave the setting as Enroll As Instructor. Do Not enter in the Email, First Name, Last Name. Click Save.

• A pop-up message will appear that the user has been enrolled.
• Note that Instructors displays 2 instead of 1. Click on the number.

• Enrolled Instructors window will pop-up. Verify that the instructor information is correct.
• If the information for First Name, Last Name, Email is missing (blank), the user does not exist in the system. Unenroll that instructor.

• If the user does not exist in the system, contact the CES Administrator to create the account first and then add the instructor.
• Alternatively, you can repeat the steps to Add the instructor again but add their Username, Email, First Name, Last Name and that will create their account.

When courses and instructors have been verified and approved and any Custom Questions have been added (if appropriate), your department course evaluations are all set.