Robust Product with Excellent Support

We use Blue to manage the course evaluation process across the entire university. I am one of about a dozen users who each manage an individual school within the university. Mine is the largest (comprising about 60% of courses offered and closer to 75% of courses evaluated). Our university has been using Blue for about three years now. We chose this software after negative experiences with our last vendor, and we were specifically looking for something that could provide all of the below: 1) Automated data feed from our student information system (SIS) to Blue. 2) Customization for each school using the software. 3) Unified email messaging (one email per student per school regardless of number of courses involved). 4) Ability to handle large and complex questionnaires with built in triggering to ask the right questions for each individual course and instructor. 5) Ability to customize opening and closing dates for evaluations down to the course level. 6) Ability to manage both mid-term and end-of-course evaluations. 7) Ability to evaluate multiple instructors for a single course with a seamless experience for students (course and all instructors on a single questionnaire) and automatic distribution of data to separate reports per instructor (all receive course responses but each sees only their instructor responses). I am the most advanced user on our campus, both based on training and based on the extensiveness with which I use the software. For most users here, the cour

Pros

The robust amount of features. Ability to copy setup from one term to the next. Ability to extensively customize evaluation process. Ability to correct an error, add a course, or otherwise update data after evaluations have started. Commitment of Explorance to improving the software based on customer feedback. Variety of training options and levels, including customer and Explorance staff led monthly webinars.

Cons

High learning curve for new users. Some of the limitations in reporting (less direct control of size/layout of displayed graphics, inability to do certain calculations in export to excel reports).

great product - great company

Blue is a great product - eXplorance is a great company.

Pros

Blue has a lot of features and integrates well with our other systems.

Cons

Blue is somewhat complicated to administer.

Steep learning curve and limited out of box reporting capabilities

Onboarding is fairly difficult. The product is complex, even to set up a basic project. It is easy to make mistakes and not enough safe-guards built in. Training new users is either very time consuming or expensive depending on whether you train in house or purchase training from Blue. The interface is not very aesthetically pleasing and the survey layouts are also difficult to make visually appealing and tend to need a lot of tinkering to make things line up and look nice. The documentation is hit and miss as far as whether it is helpful. Customer service is good with simple issues. Complex problems tend to drag on and require a lot of time commitment on the client-end to sort out.

Pros

Projects are highly customizable as far as questionnaire content is concerned.

Cons

Easy to make mistakes. Error logs usually do not provide useful information. Project set up takes more time than it should. Text export includes residual html characters that need to be converted/cleaned up before text analysis in external software. Reporting is limited and the visuals are very unattractive. Modifying the visuals is labor intensive. Much easier to export data and use an external tool. Data source set up and intermediary relationship tables unnecessarily complicate the process. The product does not take into account that more than one department in an organization may use the product i.e. a default email address that is required by the system but may result in sensitive information being shared from reports if the to/from/cc fields are not filled out properly on a report that is being disseminated via email.

Exceeding expectations and solving business needs

Pros

This software allowed us to transition from paper based to electronic reviews. It provided a large community of experienced users from which to learn best practices. It created a safe, reliable platform to maximize our evaluation process.

Cons

when a subject changes their evaluation dates, they are not reflected in all the related data tables. dynamic dates do update when reminder emails are sent. course questions vs. instructor questions and how to configure in reports.

Higher Ed review of Blue - +10 years and still going!

Overall I've had a positive experience working with Blue. Their support team is fairly knowledgeable and hands-on. Their development team is also fairly responsive to 'feature requests' which is great. My team uses the product almost daily where it satisfies most (if not all) of our survey requirements. I've enjoyed seeing Blue evolve over the past 10+ years and look forward to working with it in the future.

Pros

I've been a blue user for 10+ years and work with the product almost daily. We use it primarily for student surveys such as Student Satisfaction, Course Evaluations, and Graduate Outcomes. We also use Blue to collect information from other stakeholders (i.e. Industry, Employees, Employers, Alumni, etc). Creating surveys is easy and intuitive for my small research team. We typically do not have any down-time with this product besides the occasional maintenance shutdown to our onsite hosted environment.

Cons

Blue is a great product for surveying stakeholders at our institution however the way they deploy features to only certain blue products makes using the software challenging. A feature available in a course evaluation survey for example may not be available in another survey 'product'. I find this challenging as I've often had to recreate complete projects in order to take advantage of certain project/reporting features. The products should be seamless and integrated across all surveys in blue... For example, DRA - Dynamic Report Access is a great feature for dynamically assigning reports to a role (vs. an individual user), however is not available for use with a standard survey.