Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Survey This!

Today Wayne asked me to put together a survey for all the participants of this year's Technology, Literature and Curriculum (TLC). Wayne, Shannon, Michael Elliott, and I are getting ready to present the program to the Graduate School's Dean on Monday. Our ultimate goal is to get the Dean's blessing and money to expand the workshop to other departments, hopefully teaching at least one, and maybe two, TLCs per semester throughout the Graduate School.

But it's always better to present your case to administrators if you have some statistics to back you up. And so we're going to take a survey. (Of course, the purported validity of such a survey might be erased by having an English lit person write it. Nevertheless...)

We've all seen SurveyMonkey before. In fact, I got some experience designing with it last year when the Emory Writing Center decided to start taking all of its feedback about conferences online. What I didn't know until recently was that basic accounts on SurveyMonkey are free. There are of course some restrictions (you can only ask ten questions; you can only receive 100 responses), but I can't really envision myself needing much more than this. (Actually, I can't envision needing to really survey my classes at all apart from the requisite end of semester questions that are done by Emory.) So here's one more tool to throw in your arsenal.

1 comment:

Wayne said...

Surveys as part of assessments will only continue to be a larger part of what we do. Your friend, Survey Monkey, still does a good job for the cost. The counter to the argument that more than 10 questions requires a purchase is that perhaps any survey over 10 questions is too long.