Heard of Rypple? 
Until a few days I hadn't either until I read this post, from the HR Capitalist blog. After reading the post, and checking out some other press and buzz on Rypple, I applied for the Beta program and thanks to David Priemer at Rypple, I was quickly invited to participate.
Why was I so intrigued? Well, Rypple has a great concept, it enables anyone to solicit fast, meaningful, and anonymous performance feedback on literally any topic.
The process is straightforward and intuitive. Ask a question, enter three attributes or criteria to be assessed, and invite folks to provide feedback. Responders are not required to give their name or e-mail address, so the responses are assured to be anonymous.
For my test, I decided to use Rypple for a quick, mid-course evaluation for the students to rate my performance as an Instructor. Rypple lets you pose a topic or question for feedback and then indicate three criteria, or attributes that are to be evaluated. You can re-use these same attributes or tags on further feedback requests, enabling you to get a view over time of your performance against a key measure like 'Creativity' or 'Leadership'.
So for my test, I asked all the class members to respond to the following question:
How do you feel the Leveraging Technology class is doing in these three areas?
The three categories or attributes I asked to be evaluated on were challenging, interesting, and relevant. Respondents can also enter free form text responses to 'What you like' and 'What can be improved'.
I sent out the request for feedback on a Sunday morning, and within 10 minutes I already had received feedback. Within an hour or so, I hade received feedback from six students, and three or four more gave their feedback in the next day or so. Most of the feedback was really solid, and I immediately noticed a theme in the responses, something I need to improve in the second half of class.
So about ten students gave precise, informative, anonymous feedback in a day or two, and the entire process took me about 15 minutes to set up, and each student no more than three or four minutes to respond.
My other alternatives to soliciting this kind of feedback would be to use a tool like Survey Monkey (good, but certainly takes more time to create and administer), or the survey tool in my Course Management System (not that good, and I would waste time figuring it out since I've never used it).
The advantages of Rypple - ease of setup, anonymity, sheer speed of the feedback loop, cost (free).
The shortcomings of Rypple - not easy to get summary information, no ability to export feedback into another tool or system for further analysis.
But honestly, Rypple seems designed for one thing, simple and fast performance feedback, and it does that one thing very well.
I encourage you to check it out - Rypple.