Our questionnaire instruments are developed and adapted in close cooperation with representatives of the respective subjects and allow for comparative evaluations between different types of courses and study programmes by using a consistent set of core questions. Following a statistical review, the German version of the questionnaire "Student Evaluation of Educational Quality" (SEEQ; Marsh, 1982) has proven to be a useful evaluation instrument throughout.

Teaching quality is assessed in three areas: Teaching Success (products of good teaching), Didactic Action (process of good teaching), and Student Background Variables, which are used to classify the results and to create subgroup evaluations. The questionnaire is also available in English.

The Quality Agency conducts student surveys upon request for the purpose of evaluating teaching. Currently, about 1000 courses are evaluated each semester with an increasing tendency. These evaluations help to maintain the quality of teaching at a high level and to improve it further.

Since the winter semester 2010/2011, the course evaluation has been carried out using the evaluation software EvaSys (Education Survey Automation Suite), which ensures an efficient execution of the evaluation.

Lecturers receive feedback on their survey results in the form of an individual results report, which contains not only mean values on an item basis, but also global values that can be appropriately interpreted with an interpretation aid. In addition, anonymized average values of all other evaluations of the subject and the same course type, are presented in the form of a profile line comparison. Handwritten comments from students are manually entered by an employee of the Quality Agency up to a number of 60 completed questionnaires and are presented in plain text to ensure anonymization of the students. Depending on the period of time in which the results are sent out, each lecturer is asked to discuss their results with their students within a reasonable amount of time.

Further analyses of the course data show that students from different study programmes evaluate common courses differently. Optionally, it is possible for lecturers at the University of Augsburg to include a comparison of study programmes within their individual result reports ( list of study programmes SS23 ). Furthermore, it is possible to provide study programme-specific evaluation results.

The respective dean of studies, the respective people in charge of the study programmes and the responsible staff members at the department of evaluation at the Quality Agency have access to the results of an entire faculty. To enable students to form an impression of the lecturers and the offered courses, evaluation results are made available to students in different ways at the individual faculties. The Quality Agency provides advice and recommends to the faculties and institutions - which are still in the process of discussion - to publish the results in aggregated form in order to increase transparency and acceptance towards the students.

Block courses and courses that take place during the semester break can also be evaluated, even though they do not fall within the standardized evaluation period during the semester. For this purpose, a CSV/Excel file ( import file EvaSys ) must be filled out by the lecturers with their own course data and sent to the Quality Agency via e-mail. After processing, lecturers will receive their required documents for conducting the evaluation via e-mail.

Please direct inquiries to: susanne.reess@qa.uni-augsburg.de

Data protection is implemented in coordination with the  data protection officer of the University of Augsburg. The online surveys are carried out using the evaluation software EvaSys and evaluated anonymously, which means that it is not possible to draw conclusions about the individual participants. The results are then reported back to the corresponding lecturer via e-mail in a standardized and anonymized form.

In the preparation phase for the evaluation, the email addresses of the participants saved in Digicampus are exported and then imported into EvaSys so that an automated invitation to the online survey can be sent by email. These contact details will not be passed on to third parties and will not be used for any other purposes other than for the invitation and reminder to participate in the evaluation. After completion of the evaluation, the contact details will be deleted.