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Institutional Strategy and Analysis

Reports and Data Security

ISA posts reports for individual instructors that can be accessed with a Unity ID only by the instructor and the head of the department offering the course. These reports will remain available online, so that instructors and heads can access reports for multiple semesters.

There are two reports for individual instructors.  One summarizes the close-ended results. Here is an example report PDF Document. The other report consists of all responses to the open-ended questions, verbatim, but without identification of the respondent unless they have exposed their identity within the comments themselves.

Consistent with the University Regulation on the Evaluation of Teaching External Link, reports generated from ClassEval are confidential.  They are considered part of the instructors’ personnel records and will be available to the dean or provost for RPT or other purposes only by the instructor or her/his department head.

ClassEval results and data cannot be released outside of the direct supervisory chain of an instructor for any reason or in any form.  The confidentiality of this data is governed by the following North Carolina general statute “The Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records” which governs this data.  The full text of this statute can be found here http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/enactedlegislation/statutes/html/byarticle/chapter_126/article_7.html External Link particularly 126-24 and 126-27.

Department Head Access to Reports

Department Head access is granted through the SAR “ClassEval” transaction to a unit identified by a department level OUC (4-digit OUC). The department head can delegate access to an appropriate individual who has authorization to view personnel reports for the department.  There is some flexibility to delegate access for co-department heads or interim department heads, but this would be for all faculty and reports in the department.

There is no access to a unit smaller than a department since these are not identified in SIS and HR systems.  Institutes and centers can not be provided access.

The college or department IT security officer can enter the SAR transaction for a new department head and can also revoke access now out-dated for the out-going department head.

Data Security

Individually identifiable information – both students’ identities and their responses as well as results describing instructors – are part of student and personnel records and are treated as confidential, consistent with state and federal law.  Instructors cannot be able to isolate a single student’s responses, and users other than instructors and department heads cannot be able to isolate the results for a single instructor.

As with any other protected personnel information, deans or others with a valid “need to know” will retrieve results for individual instructors from the department head.

The database containing all responses to evaluation questions will be retained indefinitely to permit access as described above.

All ClassEval data will be protected from creation to archival storage using the same strategies used to protect other confidential student and personnel information maintained by the university:

  • The web interface (for students filling out questionnaires) is reached through appropriate authentication and the  https protocol.
  • The working datasets and reports are based on central office servers that also contain student, personnel, and other protected data, and are protected to the same level of security through firewalls and other means.
  • The transmission from central office processing to the department heads will be by an appropriate high-level security via an online interface.