The demands of the Central Office for Teaching Evaluation (Universitätsprojekt Lehrevaluation, ULe) require a high level of technical support. This includes all phases of a survey:
- planning, design and implementation,
- data collection,
- data preparation,
- data analysis and
- reporting
There are many established tools for conducting surveys that cover the above five phases. However, the requirements in the Central Office for Teaching Evaluation (ULe) have grown beyond these tools and require their own solution. This has been developed and used since 2009 under the name Coast (creative online assessment and survey tool).
Coast covers all steps of a survey and closely interlinks them. This reduces the redundancy of information and errors. It increases the throughput of surveys and reports. Multi-layered reports are a feature of Coast. It is based on a mathematical model for questionnaires and reports.
Coast enables the Central Office for Teaching Evaluation (ULe) to plan, design and implement surveys. This is simplified by a domain-specific language that helps to focus on the "what" instead of the "how". The application of complex evaluation routines requires a sound knowledge of statistics. These are profitably implemented through a connection to the statistical language R. In combination with LaTeX, a text-setting language, individual reports can be generated automatically.
