This paper concentrates on the emergence factors and themes that surfaced as result of paper and online course evaluation activities among students at Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP) that have never been reported prior to this. Before the online course and lecturer evaluation practices every semester, students need to fill out the form manually in order to evaluate the courses and lecturers, and this brings a lot of disadvantages and problems to the university. School of Human Development and Technocommunication (iKOM) has initiated the online course and evaluation approach, and is now being utilized by all schools at UniMAP. This research and innovation has also been awarded gold at the 11th Innovative and Creative Convention held at Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM) in 2015. The actual research attempted to assist the university to improve its way of handling and processing information that occurs every semester or biannually by focusing on factors that contribute to its predicament for staff and students at UniMAP. In addition, the research seeks to understand the antecedents, contexts, and prevailing conditions that influence it as well as the phenomenon, the coping strategies, and the consequences resulting from the coping strategies. Using a grounded theory methodology, in-depth interviews were conducted on students and staff from different schools at UniMAP. The data were analyzed using NVivo 10 by methodically coding and categorizing the data in open, axial, and selective coding to arrive at a model development. Working hypotheses were obtained based on informants' individual comments and experiences that uniquely contribute to the body of knowledge on this new phenomenon at UniMAP. The involved elements derived from the model are the antecedents, the phenomenon itself, the coping strategies by informants, and the consequences resulting from these strategies. The significance of this study lies in its attempt to provide a working framework for reducing the dilemma when the time comes to execute staff and course evaluation that will eventually add up to time and money lost. This study is hoped to benefit all the parties: staff, students, the university, and other stakeholders to maximize the benefits of online evaluation practices. At a time when most assessments are done online around the world, this research is both timely and necessary.
