JMU’s Course Evaluation System Will Be Offline May 26-30, 2025
JMU’s online course evaluation system, Blue, will be offline and inaccessible from May 26-30 for a system upgrade. Instructors and faculty, you should download the PDF versions of your Spring 2025 reports to your local computer if you need to access them during this time. When the system upgrade is complete, we will post an announcement.
Questions? Please contact Donna Davis, the Libraries’ Course Evaluation Administrator, at LIDdesk@jmu.edu.
The transition from a primarily paper-based course evaluation process to the online "Blue" course evaluation system was successfully completed in Fall, 2020. All academic units are now using the online system.
Conversations began in the Fall semester of 2011 about the course evaluation process at JMU and the need to find a solution for evaluating online courses. Through the work of the Student Evaluations of Teaching Task Force, faculty members researched and evaluated best practices of evaluating teaching and discovered commonalities in the variety of evaluation tools being utilized at JMU. This work, in addition to information from campus conversations on academic rigor and sustainability resulted in the recommendation to move to a campus-wide online evaluation system.
Based on recommendations from the Student Evaluations of Teaching Task Force, the university purchased the Blue online evaluation system. With the support of the Blue Project Implementation Team and the Blue Executive Committee, the pilot rollout of Blue began in Spring 2013. Since that time, approximately 28 academic units have transitioned all of their course evaluations to Blue. By Fall 2020, all academic units will be using Blue for all fall and spring course evaluations and by Summer 2021 for summer course evaluations.
The purpose of this site:
- List the guiding principles for using the system for online evaluation of courses
- Share a departmental readiness guide for academic unit heads
- Provide the course evaluation schedule for each semester
- Provide technical support guides for common faculty tasks
- Share sample evaluation reports
The Blue system will provide these benefits:
- Instructors receive reports on their evaluations more quickly
- Longer, more in-depth student responses to open-ended questions
- Option for students to do evaluations outside of class time and for faculty to select a specific date and time when evaluations are available to the students
- Digital reports containing statistic and graphical reporting that are archived for future reference
We invite you to use this website to educate and inform about the evaluation of teaching and the Blue course evaluation system.