WCourEva: Web-based course evaluation system using XML technologies

This paper describes WCourEva, a new Web-based course evaluation system being developed at the University of Nagasaki. WCourEva is intended to assist administrative staff in defining a default questionnaire for each academic unit as well as additional customized questionnaires for individual instructors. The advantages include easy development and maintenance of the default and additional questionnaires, automatic generation of Web pages for filling out a questionnaire using XML, and bidirectional communication between the instructor and anonymous students. Analysis of course evaluation results from various points of view is aided by automatically generated summaries, and a Microsoft Excel®spreadsheet is generated that presents a consolidate view of students’ feedback on the courseware. Instructors can harness the vast data presentation capabilities of the Microsoft Excel®2003 package to replace the bar chart with any convenient type of graph and to compare their evaluation results with those of previous academic years.