Twenty Years of Course Evaluations
In June 2005, SurveyDIG deployed its first institutional course evaluation system at a private university in the Midwest.
Twenty years later, the enterprise software landscape looks completely different. Entire generations of edtech startups have launched, raised venture capital, been acquired, and dissolved. In higher education IT, the average lifespan of a third-party software contract is between three and five years.
Yet across SurveyDIG's client community, long-term tenure is the rule rather than the exception. More than half of our partner colleges and universities have relied on SurveyDIG for over 15 years—with active partnerships extending across statewide community college systems, comprehensive state universities, private colleges, and technical institutes.
What keeps institutions partnered with the same evaluation system across decades?
1. Respecting Faculty Governance and Collective Bargaining
Course evaluations are not just administrative surveys; they directly impact promotion, tenure, and faculty evaluation. In many state systems, evaluation procedures are governed by faculty union contracts and collective bargaining agreements (CBAs).
Generic survey tools treat course evaluations like marketing forms. When a platform ignores contractual nuances—such as faculty opt-in/opt-out rules, department-specific question banks, or strict reporting suppression rules—grievances and faculty distrust follow. Systems that last in higher education earn faculty confidence by respecting academic governance.
2. Surviving the Campus ERP Lifecycle
Over a 15- to 20-year period, a college or university typically navigates multiple major infrastructure shifts:
- Migrating through generations of ERP releases (from on-premise Oracle databases to cloud-hosted environments, and now to SaaS APIs like Ellucian Ethos).
- Transitioning learning management systems (WebCT, Blackboard, Canvas, Brightspace, Moodle).
- Upgrading campus single sign-on protocols (LDAP, CAS, Shibboleth, SAML, OAuth2/OIDC, Microsoft Entra ID).
Long-term partners stay because SurveyDIG adapts with them. When a campus modernizes its SIS or moves to the cloud, evaluation workflows continue uninterrupted, preserving historical reporting continuity.
3. Protecting Academic Trust
Academic trust rests on clear boundaries between grading and student evaluations:
- Students must know their feedback is anonymous so they can be honest without fear of retaliation.
- Instructors must know that student responses cannot be viewed until final course grades have been submitted and rolled in the SIS.
Automating these rules reliably term after term removes friction between faculty senates, registrars, and students.
4. Direct Support from People Who Understand Higher Ed
When campus administrators need assistance during the final two weeks of a semester, they cannot afford to submit a ticket to an anonymous tier-1 support queue.
Over twenty years, our approach has remained consistent: campus administrators work directly with senior engineers who understand registrar calendars, section parts of term, cross-listed courses, and data integration.
Software comes and goes, but reliability, respect for faculty governance, and dependable human support remain the foundation of lasting higher education partnerships.