Welcome back from the short holiday break. Don’t tell the wellness folks, but I hope you got to eat all the pumpkin pie and whipped cream you could stand!

But just in case you thought that you were going to ease your way back into the comforting routine of winter term, I thought that now would be the perfect time to tell you about a nifty change that is coming down the pike.

What if you could see your IDEA feedback summary and student comments as soon as you submitted your grades for the term? It seems to me like that would be pretty awesome.

And what if you could get real-time IDEA feedback from your students in the middle of the term so that you could adjust on the fly? It seems to me like that would be pretty cool, too.

Remember a year or two ago when I reported that IDEA was going to phase out their paper forms some time in the next several years? Well, I’ve been informed that the paper forms will breathe their last collective breath in the spring of 2018. That means that, unless we want to go out onto the market and audition all of the other players in the course feedback survey industry (from whom I get phone calls or emails at least twice a week about their “exciting fully customizable online format”) or take on the monumental task of building a homegrown course feedback system, we need to plan on moving to a paperless IDEA system in the fall of 2018.

To be honest, I may have oversold this change a bit. In reality, it’s not going to change the daily life of an instructor much. You’ll still choose your learning objectives at the beginning of the term, and the students still complete the same set of items (albeit with some improvements that actually align better with our own college outcomes) at the end of the term. In many cases, you’ll likely opt to use class time for students to enter their responses on their phones, tablets, or laptops instead of coloring in little circles on a piece of paper. Solving the potential problem that some students won’t have a device that can access the survey is probably a pretty simple one (one possibility would be to borrow a neighbor’s phone or laptop).

Now I suspect that some of you have questions about how this is going to work. And we wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we didn’t wonder about all of the ways that the paperless process could go horribly awry. But after quizzing the IDEA consultant, it seems as if they’ve found a myriad of ways to avoid the obstacles we most often worry about (e.g., low response rates, satisficing, etc.).

Nonetheless, we will host plenty of opportunities to answer questions about the details of this change – both in person and online. So what do we do when change finds us? Put your arms out wide and embrace the possibilities!

Seriously, what else are you going to do?

Make it a good day,

Mark