FAIRFIELD, NJ – October 21, 2008 –Timecruiser Computing Corporation, a trusted software as a service (SaaS) partner to the higher education community since 1999, today announced the availability of CruiserEval™, the newest advancement in college course evaluation systems. As the latest addition to Timecruiser’s CampusEngagement™ solution portfolio, CruiserEval provides an on-demand, SaaS, online learning evaluation and analytics system that allows institutions to cost-effectively measure the impact of their courses, instruction, and student experience--and improve performance.
Automating course evaluations through CruiserEval on-demand service can produce significant savings, and improve the process and results in numerous ways:
- Significantly increased efficiencies lead to significant cost reductions.
- Student ease of use and convenience yield more candid responses.
- Evaluation data captured are stored over time for extended analysis (trend/historical).
- The faculty care about accuracy – with SaaS, data accuracy, longitudinal analysis, and accountability increase.
- The course evaluation process is streamlined and flexible, facilitating timely access to data
Why Go with SaaS for Course Evaluations?
The conventional, paper-based course evaluation process is costly and labor-intensive. “Course evaluations are used for faculty reviews, content improvement, and the collection of data for making critical and informed decisions, but when the data are difficult to access, they remain unused,” said Allen Wang, President of Timecruiser. “However, when colleges and universities can leverage evaluation data to their advantage by getting the right information to the right people at the right time, they can make better decisions sooner.”
“Under the outdated Application Service Provider (ASP) model, the provider resells and houses a traditional, local software application in its remote facility,” said Anthony Ma, Timecruiser CIO. “Although the ASP model relieves the customer of the operating responsibility, unlike on-demand SaaS solutions, it doesn’t eliminate the cost for the acquisition, configuration, deployment and, later on, upgrades of the software and hardware. In most cases, such operations do not have the ability to effectively scale to accommodate fluctuating usage patterns.”
CruiserEval will be available in the first quarter of 2009.