Vejen Business College chose Opinoma for teaching evaluation, well-being and motivation surveys

If you’ve driven on the highway between Kolding and Esbjerg, you’ve passed Vejen on the halfway point. Vejen Business College has been here for over 100 years – but you wouldn’t know it: today it’s a state-of-the-art school with a very green and sustainable profile. It’s not the only thing that’s green – the ETU has shown for several years that students’ social well-being and learning environment are above the national average. But with an imminent focus on creating the best conditions for students’ education, Vejen Business College wanted to increase the focus on teaching evaluation even more.

The Pedagogical Committee at Vejen Business College had therefore long wanted to develop a new questionnaire to inspire students to reflect on their own learning environment – with a focus on the student’s own efforts, teaching, the role of the teacher, feedback and professional development. Finally, there was a desire for a series of questions tailored to individual subjects.

“We knew it was a major project we were opening up in the Pedagogical Committee, but our focus on creating an even better education for our students and letting their voices be heard led us to start turning traditional evaluation questionnaires on their head“, says Pedagogical Manager Tommy Bach Christensen. Learners should only engage with the learning after they have engaged with their own efforts. The entire framework is inspired by Dorte Ågård and Søren Keller’s “Pedagogical leadership in theory and practice” and is rooted in theorists such as Bandura, Ryan and Deci, Hattie,” Tommy elaborates.

Opinoma held a presentation and it turned out that Opinoma’s proprietary sentence builder was the perfect match for the new question framework. Here, students had to complete a sentence by choosing their own answer.

“Opinoma was the only solution that could support the questionnaire. Both we and our students are happy with the new questionnaire – and the platform.” Tommy continues.

The new questionnaire was set up in Opinoma – and the evaluations were created centrally and automatically sent to the teachers: “We were emailed a unique code, the students started evaluating, and immediately afterwards we were able to access the teams’ responses to our individual evaluations. We can actually compare them too, which was interesting across my Spanish teams,” Tommy elaborates.

Opinoma is committed to continuously developing the platform to suit the needs of educational institutions. Therefore, the wishes of educational institutions are listened to in order to create the best evaluation platform: “Although Opinoma includes many different templates for teaching evaluation, educational institutions can also create new questionnaires themselves. It was a very educational process for us to hear the thoughts of Vejen Business College’s Pedagogical Committee on how teaching evaluations can create a space for reflection for students. Already, several other educational institutions have praised their new evaluation practices, and I couldn’t agree more,” says Rasmus Holm from Opinoma.

Opinoma streamlines the onboarding process, including kickoff meetings and regular follow-up meetings. This ensures optimal project management and rapid value creation for educational institutions. This applies to both teachers and management, who need data for quality assurance. “Our teachers welcomed the new questionnaire developed by the Pedagogical Committee – and the transition to a new evaluation system went very smoothly. Our student administration could create all the assessments centrally and send them out to our teachers, who could then access their results themselves. I’ve subsequently been able to dive into a range of interesting data, free text answers and comparisons. It’s easy to use and the graphs provide a good overview,” says Head of Education Kim Bisgaard.

Almost 100 evaluations later, across 16 courses, the evaluation process was running more streamlined than ever before: “In our old evaluation system, there was a lot of administration involved in creating and sending out the evaluations. Then we also had to generate reports to send to each teacher. The time spent handling evaluations has been greatly reduced since we made the decision to switch to Opinoma,” concludes Study Administrator Mette Kokholm.