Indiana University Bloomington Leverages Explorance Blue Question Bank to Streamline Course Evaluations for 46,000 Students

About Indiana University Bloomington

Indiana University Bloomington (IU Bloomington), the flagship and largest campus of the Indiana University System, has been delivering top-ranked academic excellence for over two centuries. As a member of the prestigious Big Ten Academic Alliance, IU Bloomington combines world-class education with a strong commitment to research and collaboration. Ranked among the top five schools nationally in the 2013 Campus Conservation Nationals, the university is also a leader in sustainability, consistently adopting resource-saving and efficiency-driven campus policies.

The Challenge: Finding a Scalable Solution for a Complex Academic Environment

Indiana University Bloomington faced a significant challenge in finding a course evaluation system that could unify and streamline feedback collection across its decentralized structure. With over 46,000 students enrolled in more than 550 academic programs, the university was relying on different methods, including paper forms and various department-specific online tools, to gather student feedback.

This approach made it difficult to generate consistent, actionable insights on teaching effectiveness across the institution. Some academic units had already experimented with online evaluations, but with mixed results in terms of response rates. Meanwhile, paper-based evaluations posed issues such as incomplete submissions and limited faculty oversight.

For a university as complex as IU Bloomington, the successful implementation and long-term sustainability of course evaluations depended on adopting a robust, scalable, and centralized solution that can still accommodate for the unique needs of each academic unit.

Solution: Streamlining Feedback Collection Across Complex Academic Units

To address the challenges of a decentralized structure and inconsistent feedback practices, IU Bloomington turned to Explorance Blue. The goal was to implement a unified course evaluation system without sacrificing the flexibility individual academic units had previously enjoyed.

“We wanted to be able to pull each academic unit into the new system without losing a lot of the flexibility we had access to before. Blue was the closest in doing that,” shared Krisy Mahome, Assistant Director for IU Bloomington Evaluation Services and Testing.

The Outcome: Streamlining Large-Scale Evaluations with Targeted Customization

By implementing Explorance Blue, IU Bloomington successfully centralized its course evaluation process across multiple campuses while maintaining the flexibility needed for its decentralized academic structure.

Blue’s cascading project model and Question Bank allowed the university to support large-scale evaluations with hundreds of targeted questions, customized by academic unit using demographic data from systems like the SIS and LMS. This approach not only streamlined operations but also significantly improved student engagement.

“We fully launched Blue online course evaluations in fall of 2015, and we had the highest response rate to date that term,” said Krisy Mahome, Assistant Director for IU Bloomington Evaluation Services and Testing.

The centralized system also gave students access to evaluation results during course registration, helping them make more informed decisions while reinforcing a culture of transparency and continuous improvement.