A weekly newsletter to build community through updates, opportunities, and celebrations

August 28, 2025 | Volume 12 | Issue 3

By Gretchen Benton

It’s hard to believe that it is already time to begin talking about course evaluations! You may have already started seeing emails from our SmartEvals system about Early Course Evaluations. This is a chance for you to get feedback early in the semester.

How do Course Evaluations work?

Course evaluations are sent for all curriculum, MAT 7045/045, and ENG 8045/045 courses. All of these courses receive an End of Course Evaluation, but only courses longer than 45 days also receive an Early Course Evaluation. Instructors get an email announcing the evaluation dates for each course evaluation before students start receiving emails. Students receive automated email reminders every three days while the evaluation is open, so students receive two emails in a typical week-long evaluation. Instructors can also send reminder emails to students and share their own personalized QR code to get responses via student mobile devices. 

2025FA Course Evaluation Schedule

• First 8 week courses
• Early Course Eval: Sept 1-8
• End of Course Eval: Oct 5-13
• 16 week courses
• Early Course Eval: Sept 17-24
• End of Course Eval: Dec 9-17
• Second 8 week courses
• Early Course Eval: Nov 4-12
• End of Course Eval: Dec 9-17
• All other courses (Section 5, courses that are not typical 8 or 16 week schedules) 
• Early Course Eval: Available for 1 week right after the 25% point in the course (for courses longer than 45 days)
• End of Course Eval: Available 1 week at the 80% mark in the course

Accessing Evaluation Results

Evaluation results are emailed as PDFs to instructors two days after the evaluations close. 

By Trudy Brown

Do you use YouTube videos in your course? Do you want to be able to track whether students are watching the videos? YuJa analytics can help. Want to add some questions to the video to keep students engaged? You can do that too. 

You can add YouTube videos into your YuJa media library where you can use them in the same way that you use videos you made, except that you can’t edit them. Once you share them with students through Moodle, you can use the analytics to see who is watching the videos and how much time they spend watching the videos. 

There is one important accessibility note to be aware of if you want to use this feature, however. YuJa is not able to duplicate all of the video controls for YouTube videos. This includes the button to turn captions on and off. However, YouTube keyboard shortcuts still work, so be sure to tell students that they can click the letter “c” on their keyboards to turn captions on and off. There is currently no solution for students who are watching on their phones, so it’s important to communicate this to students. YuJa support is already working on a solution for this issue, but in the meantime, make sure to include this tip in instructions to students when having them watch a YouTube video that is linked through YuJa. 

For more information, see our Freshdesk article about using YouTube through YuJa.