Emailing Instructors in Course Evaluations

@Kristin Anderson I believe we are doing the email by hand also using the Enrollment File.  We thought that the email would be automated also.  

I thought maybe I was doing something wrong. Do you have to upload your enrollment file again, but into a list to use in the directories?

@Kristin Anderson I think the user that works with that takes my list that I saved in the library and does mail merge using her outlook account.  

This is the second time sending everything out by ourself.  

Not a helpful answer I’m afraid @Kristin Anderson but we are also doing ours manually. We do them outside of Qualtrics using our institutions mailing lists. We create a mailing list for the teaching period and email a generic link to the response rate dashboard (along with regular reminders throughout the survey period).

There is a way using the teacher questions functionality to email all teachers in a term, however it is associated with the additional questions portal. It won’t be automated but it may be a way for you to trigger an email without having to reupload the list? I haven’t tried it personally but was thinking potentially since you can customise the body of the email, you could simply remove any references to the teacher questions and instead put in the dashboard link. You would need to simply go in and schedule the email to the list of teachers, filtered to the relevant term.

Would love to hear if anyone else comes up with a solution to actually automate it though!

@Kristin Anderson @Linda_charlton @ashleigh_quaill 

Thanks all for this great conversation! Here is what my team recommended:
A work around would be to create a mock "student" enrollment for each teacher with their email. Have it match the teacher's course enrollment. Distributions to the course would include this teacher's "student" enrollment. This would send a link to that email, along with the other students, effectively letting the teachers now that a distribution went out for their course. They can ignore the survey obviously and just use this as a notification of sorts. 

Other option is including teacher(s) in the report emails that get sent after any evaluation goes out. (Settings -> Organization Settings -> Reports). But this would notify teachers when any distribution goes out, not just for their course. It may be an option depending on how your surveys are configured.

Hope this helps!

@brookel the problem with adding an additional student for each teacher would be the skew to the response rates as a result of additional invitations. If you are accurately recording your distributions, this additional student (or multiple students if you have multiple teaching staff across multiple units) is going to alter your response rate reporting. 

I also know in our experience, staff need very detailed instructions so an email addressed to students about a survey would prompt confusion from our teaching staff! It might work in other contexts though.

Thanks everyone for the replies. I was hoping I was missing something or there was an easy workaround. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that way. Hopefully, Qualtrics reads these and will take our suggestion for a near future upgrade.

Definitely flagging this information to our team! Appreciate all of your patience and the conversation around this. Thanks.

Our workaround was to create a course evaluation schedule table by course/instructor, and post that table on a SharePoint site for instructors to reference. My preference is a more active, automated, ‘email the instructors on the distribution day’ approach, so this table is a stop gap until we have a better solution. It would not work for us to create instructor email lists manually, as our distribution schedule is quite large and complex - distributions happen nearly every day, with around 3,000 instructors and 7000-8000 courses in a given term.

In SP, I successfully tested an email trigger in Flows using Power Automate, but considering the amount of data we’re working with, it still wouldn’t be sustainable for us. However, with a smaller data set, the SP email trigger might be worth exploring.

@brookel Isn’t the issue here that these users don’t have the Qualtrics Course Evaluations platform? Our campus pays for this separate service where instructors & students are automatically emailed that their course eval is open and sent reminders as to when it’s about to close. The faculty email distribution (via automation aka future workflow) seems to be similar to regular Qualtrics setup sans the distribution of the survey. The students are sent course evaluations in that they are emailed when the universal eval web portal (where all their course evals are located) is open and sent reminders when they’ll be closed. The latter setup is I think a custom build. Will this course eval service become available to all Qualtrics XM institutions at no cost?

@csulb.spot.6584 we are referring to the Course Evaluations Platform in this chain, however there isn’t a functionality to contact instructors as part of the automated survey launch to students. Having said that, if the instructors are also provided with the same survey as students (which I know is the case at some institutions by design, or the solution proposed by @brookel as a notification workaround). For us, instructors don’t receive the same student survey (there is a separate survey deployed to staff which is handled outside of Course Evaluations). We handle emails to instructors separately (and manually) unfortunately.

Seems like different work-arounds for different institutional needs. We distribute 1 survey or 1 type of course evaluation to all students throughout the term since some courses are shorter. We schedule the faculty emails in Automation/Workflows to match the student course evaluation schedule so things are automatic. I can’t imagine this as a manual process since we have a large campus too with over 2K faculty and 7K courses per semester. I hope Qualtrics does find everyone a solution. Good luck!