Explorance Blue

Explorance Blue is a course evaluation software adopted by Indiana University for course and instructor evaluations. The Bloomington, Indianapolis, and South Bend campuses have been using BLUE for a few years. Starting Fall of 2017, the system will also be used at IU Kokomo.

Your students will receive an email invitation for every course they are enrolled in. They will click the link provided and then complete the evaluation. Students should be reminded that emails will be sent to student’s official IU email address. Students can also access BLUE from Canvas by choosing the Course Questionnaire* in the left-hand margin in a currently enrolled Canvas course.

*To make sure students can see the Course Questionnaire tab in the left margin of your Canvas course, you will need to ensure that the link if visible. If the link is not visible, go to Settings Navigation and find the Course Questionnaire and drag it up to unhide it. BLUE will sync your department’s course evaluation to your course.

Your students can complete their course evaluations at any time between the time they receive their invitation and the end of the evaluation period (typically the end of classes). They can use any computer or mobile device that has access to the internet to complete their evaluations.

Typically sometime after the semester is over, the evaluations reports will be run as a batch process. Once all the reports are generated, the faculty will receive an email notification that will instruct them on how to obtain their reports.

There is a feature of BLUE to allow faculty to add questions to the standard questions from your department. This feature will not be available for our Fall 2017 roll out. 

Yes. When the data is loaded into the system, each section is given a starting and ending period. Students are invited to complete their evaluations typically 7 to 14 days (depending on the length of the course) prior to the end of the course. Evaluations must be completed by the end of the period specified (typically the last day of classes, as specified on the Registrar’s website).

In order to complete their evaluations, students must log in to IU’s Central Authentication System (CAS) to ensure they are in fact your students. Therefore, students are not anonymous. However, students should be assured that they are “anonymous to their faculty.” In other words, their faculty will be able to see only an aggregated report and no single student responses.

Students are identified as enrolled in a course by the SIS data.  Students will receive an email each time a course evaluation is available to be completed. Once they complete the evaluation, that task is completed and they no longer are able to access the evaluation.

This is a common concern for most faculty. Here are some suggestions to improve your student participation:

a) For online courses, you can include the evaluation as a course assignment in Canvas, not graded. This assignment will then be included on the student’s To Do list on their Canvas Dashboard.

b) For face to face courses, you can treat this online evaluation the same way you did a paper evaluation and set aside time in class to complete it. Ask students to bring a device, log into your Canvas course, click on Course Questionnaire and complete the evaluation. You should leave the room as you would have during paper evaluations.  

Once the system is fully implemented, the following university personnel have access to evaluation data.

• Faculty have access to their own course evaluation reports.
• Administrators and/or their delegates (in the department, college, and campus) have access to course evaluations reports.
• Administrators and/or their delegates (department, college, and campus) have access to unit reports (showing aggregate information for the academic unit).
• The Blue system administrator(s) have access to all reports (individual as well as a unit).

At this point, the BLUE system is housed at IU Bloomington. We rely on IU’s computing and networking infrastructure.