During a recent 2-day eLearning Quality Workshop in North Dakota we again had a brief discussion about student evaluations for online courses. Part of the discussion centered on the overall validity of student responses on course evals and part of it centered on the evaluation surveys themselves; particularly how long should they be and how can you get good response rates on a voluntary submission basis. (Flickr CC photo by kodomut ) A few years ago we (Lake Superior College) redesigned our end-of-course survey rather dramatically, from 32 questions to 10. We were hoping that the response rate would go up significantly if the students could see at a glance that the survey would only take a couple of minutes to complete. The response rate did go up, but only by a few percentage points and it still is less than 20% overall for all online courses combined. Near the end of each term, we set up separate course shells within D2L for each online course and then enroll all the students but no...