Students in the College of Arts and Sciences will now fill out their course evaluations online.

The College of Arts and Sciences is now using a new program called eValuate, which allows students to answer questions online about the quality of the courses in which they are enrolled for the spring semester.

Course surveys previously have been on paper and hand written with a pen or pencil.

The switch from paper to electronic will help save money, protect the environment and conserve class time, said Kelly Damphousse, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

“I think it will be better all the way around,” he said.

The program will help reduce costs because about 70,000 evaluations are filled out each year.

The efforts will help save OU $10K a semester, Damphousse said.

Although the system is expected to work better than paper evaluations, there still may be some drawbacks, he said.

He said it’s likely there will be a decrease in respondents to the online surveys because there will no longer be class time allotted to filling out the evaluations and students may not feel obligated to fill out the survey.

To encourage students to participate in the surveys, the college is entering students who complete the evaluations into a drawing for free iPod Shuffles.

Damphousse said the college also is taking steps to make sure the evaluations are accessible to all students enrolled in a class in the college.

He said the college has sent out e-mails to students enrolled in his college’s courses reminding them to take the survey and has the link to the course evaluations posted on the Desire 2 Learn Web site. A link to the course evaluation Web site also is posted on the college’s Facebook and Twitter pages.

UOSA President Katie Fox, international area studies senior, was involved in providing feedback to OU officials about the program and said the it will have a positive impact. She said students in the College of Arts and Sciences already have expressed positive feedback for the program.

But cutting costs and going green are not the only incentives for moving the evaluations online, she said.

Fox said other universities already have made the move to electronic evaluations and have seen more productive feedback.

Damphousse said students who fill out the electronic evaluations are likely to give more thorough answers in the open response part of the surveys because they can respond at their leisure.

Students also can look at their professors’ evaluation data from the previous semester on the Web site, Damphousse said. He said every semester a report is compiled from the course evaluations and is used to produce a report about the instructor. This information will now be available to students who are filling out surveys online about their enrolled courses in the College of Arts and Sciences.