Workshop on Creating a Survey and/or Ballot

Faculty have increasingly found web-based surveys and ballots useful for research, teaching, and service, and some of the published research on the topic has found problems with the limited options that for-profit web services provide free of charge to academics. Since the English Department has our own system, one not widely known by people in the department, it makes sense to be our first workshop.

So. Please join us in Ross 212 next Wednesday, February 16th, at noon. Bring a lunch if you'd like. Geoff Sauer will show the English Department's research/survey/ballot system, and help everyone interested sign up for an account so they may use the system for a number of purposes:

· The system permits 'double-envelope' voting, which permits people
  only one vote per person, keeps records of who has (and has not)
  voted so far, and preserves complete anonymity — there's no way
  to identify who cast which vote.

· The system has been accepted for several years by the ISU IRB as a
  secure method for qualitative and quantitative research. If one uses
  the software's 'tokens' feature, it's possible to raise response rates
  well above those achieved with less-powerful web services, such as
  SurveyMonkey.

· One of our graduate students last year used the system for end-of-term
  course evaluations, since there was no easy system for administering
  paper evaluations in his online course.

· Degree programs may use the system to poll current majors, perform
  an 'exit survey' of graduating students, or poll alumni to gather data
  about learning outcomes.

· Instructors have found it possible to use this system in class, to poll
  students in lectures and have students post questions (or answers)
  using cell phones, iPods, tablet, netbook, or laptop computers, or
  if the class is held in a computer classroom from the desktop PCs
  in order to make class lectures more engaging, displaying results live
  on a projector, all without the need for expensive/proprietary 'clickers'.

Please feel free to join us. The presentation will be informal, and will show everything one would need to know to collect information using modern web services.