From Hours to Minutes: Alamo Colleges Automates 9,000+ Course Evaluations with Explorance Blue

About Alamo Colleges District

Based in San Antonio, Texas, the Alamo Colleges District is a network of five independently accredited community colleges serving over 100,000 students annually. With a highly diverse and economically disadvantaged student population, Alamo plays a vital role in expanding access to higher education, workforce credentials, and transfer opportunities to four-year institutions across Texas.

The Challenge: Managing Massive Complexity with Limited Resources

Each semester, Alamo Colleges faced the daunting task of administering course evaluations across more than 9,000 courses, 74 departments, and 20 overlapping parts of term each semester, all while ensuring data accuracy, faculty access, and timely reporting.

Manually running dozens of projects to capture this feedback wasn’t sustainable and introduced inconsistencies, and a significant time burden, especially with limited staff and a highly decentralized academic structure. The challenge wasn’t just technical, it was structural, and the team required a more scalable approach. One that could handle complexity without constant manual oversight.

The Solution: Automating with Data, Hierarchy, and a Few Clicks

To tackle the complexity of scaling evaluations across five colleges and thousands of courses, Steven A. Szeszko II, Process Functional Manager Office of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Success, Alamo Colleges District, led the effort to fully automate Alamo’s course evaluation workflow using Explorance Blue.

Central to this solution was a seamless integration with Ellucian Banner, the institution’s student information system. Alamo’s IT team developed scripts that extract enrollment, course, user, and hierarchy data from Banner into eight structured data sources, which are updated daily and fed directly into Blue. This ensures that the evaluation system always reflects the latest course additions, drops, and faculty assignments without manual upkeep.

With reliable data in place, Blue automatically handles survey distribution. Start and end dates are dynamically assigned based on part of term, while triggers apply additional questions for specific course types like labs. To support Alamo’s decentralized model, college identifiers are prepended to department and subject names to ensure correct routing and reporting. Report generation is also fully automated. Instructors receive individual reports after grades are posted, and departmental leaders access continuously updated dashboards.

Blue automatically handles:

• Survey Distribution
• Enrollment Updates
• Response Tracking
• Reminders
• Report Delivery

The Outcome: A Scalable, Repeatable Model for Survey Automation

Today, Alamo’s course evaluation process is not just streamlined; it’s fully automated. What was once a labor-intensive operation requiring dozens of hours each term has been reduced to a simple, repeatable workflow that takes just 20 minutes to complete with Blue. “When I set up a term, it takes me about 20 minutes to set up the project and to set up our three reports,” said Szeszko

Faculty are now empowered with real-time dashboards and QR codes for in-class engagement, while administrators benefit from continuously updated reporting. For Alamo, automation isn’t just about saving time. It’s about consistency, clarity, and confidence in the feedback process. “With a few clicks of the mouse, it literally is what it’s all going to come down to,” Szeszko said.