On Survey Creators

Online survey creators come in very handy for activites and assessments in online learning. I am giving my comments below on some of the ones I have been able to explore and use.They are all free Comments are welcome and appreciated!

1. Survey Monkey Creator
2. Response-O-Matic
3. PhPESP Survey Creator
4. Survey Key Creator
5. Students Assessement of Learning Gains

1.SURVEY MONKEY CREATOR

I have used this survey creator and it is very efficient. The url to the site is:

 http://www.surveymonkey.com

You can create different kinds of questions (open and close-ended). The following are examples for an online course I will be soon delivering in Spanish.

Advantages:

• You can select among different item formats (multiple choice, Likert scale, open ended short or long answers, essay forms, etc.)
• You can keep the survey closed until you want to make it public.
• You can take it to your web page server, or just provide the link to Monkey server.
• The results are figure out for you.
• Survey takers can go back to edit responses, or they can answer some questions and leave others for later because the answers are saved.
• You can select background color for your survey.

Disadvantages:

• This is a free service up to 100 survey takers. Otherwise, you need to pay for it. (we don't usually have more than a 100 students in a class, hopefully)
• Once somebody answers a question, you cannot edit the survey and the answers given count in your final results. So, you cannot pre-test it. A solution for this? : Create twin surveys (clon your survey), test one, and make the necessary editions to the other one. Once you are happy with the look and content of your survey, delete the "test" survey.
• To see results, you need to go to the monkey site.

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2. RESPONSE-O-MATIC

This the url to a post-viewing activity I designed for a video about Modernism in Barcelona, Spain, created with Response-O-Matic : http://www.response-o-matic.com

Post-viewing activity: http://www.geocities.com/dygonza/postviewex3.html

Advantages:

• You create the survey or activity on your web page.
• You get each result in your e-mail account.
• You can select from different kinds of item formats.
• You can pre-test your survey.
• Students or survey takers can edit their responses.
• You can design the layout of your web page (if you know html).

Disadvantages:

• You need to edit the html code you get from the Response-O-Matic site, so you need to understand some basic html tags, to be able to select the kind of item you want to use.
• You need to figure out your own results.

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3. PHP SURVEY CREATOR       

This survey creator can be found at http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~ah666/fsiweb/phpESP-1.3/admin/index.php?

    In order to try this tool, I created a "Trial Survey". I was very excited because it was very easy and intuitive. There are many types of questions to select from, you can take it to your own web page with a code, you can select the option to receive each survey completed in your e-mail account, and you can see the results converted to graphics in the site, and they can exported. Ah, you can also test the survey and see how the results are given before deciding to make it public, during this process, it is possible to edit your survey and the results of your testing are not considered for the final results. Sounds good!!

    However, my first attempt to copy the code to the HTML editor was unsuccessful, I got a blank page. So, I went back and made a copy of the test. The code did not work either but I decided to test it,  this time, when I decided to see the results from my testing, I got a "fatal error" message :-(

    I did not give up. I went back to the site and created "A New Trial" survey:

        You can see that I reported my failure to create a survey in the introduction to this one. Keep looking...

    I was asking myself why the first survery did not work. Maybe it was me because I did not read the instructions, it looked so easy! Or maybe I made a mistake copying the code??? Who knows! I was given a new code for my web page:

    Well, it did not work! and when I tried to publish the survey, this is the message I finally got:

Warning: Wrong datatype for second argument in call to in_array in /u1.bath/s34/ah666/public_html/fsiweb/phpESP-1.3/admin/include/where/status.inc on line 72

I gave up! Maybe be it is me, but I decided that if took me that long to get nothing, it was not worth the effort, when there are other survey creators that work fine.

If you ever give this survey creator a try, and are successful, let me know!

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4. SURVEY KEY CREATOR

    Since I asked my Webheads friends to give me feedback on this report and to add any other tool they had tried, I got this message, which is self-explanatory, from Rita:

Great, Daf! Thanks for all your help and willingness to share!!

I'm adding my two cents here. I have come across another survey creator, which I find useful. It's at:

https://www.surveykey.com/ 

It has several interesting features, like:

• It's free, there are lots of examples to view and different types to select from.

• We can choose from different overall appearances.

• There's a spreadsheet result option.

• Detailed results and analysis of data available.

• Editable questions as you go, pre-view option included.

• We can copy and paste url into an email message to send ourselves or add it as a link on our website.

• Up to 50 responses available for 30 days (possible to increase)
  (see more "features" clicking on the link)

I've put up one question for a try, here it is:

https://www.surveykey.com/take-survey.cfm?surveykey=1322

Daf, can you find any disadvantages?

A big hug

Rita

As soon as I got this message, I went to the survey, completed it, and clicked on the submit button. But, I wanted to create one too, and so I did. You can see it here, and if you are kind enough, you can answer the questions there for me. :-)

https://www.surveykey.com/take-survey.cfm?surveykey=1325

the disadvantages i see so far...

• Respondants can not check what they have answered before submitting.

• The process of creating the survey is not very clear

• I had some problems with error pages showing up; so, I had to go back to   the previous page.

• Well, writing this, I have found another one, I tried to go back to the main page of the site, and see my survey, and I am not able to see it. It gives a message that I have already answered it, which means that if I want to be able to see my survey I should not answer it myself.

I think this is fine option, though.

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5. STUDENT ASSESSMENT OF LEARNING GAINS (SALG)

This is not really a survey creator, this is site where there is an instrument already designed by Elaine Seymour (1997), and tested by many users. This is the description given at the site:

http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/salgains/instructor/

• Modify the SALG instrument so that it fits your own course design
• Enable your students to complete this instrument on-line
• Review and download a statistical analysis of the students' responses

I have used it for my architecture online course, and I think it is excellent. It allows for both quantitative and qualitive data collection. Students need a password to be able to get access the page, so you are sure that nobody else will be using the address and feeding non-solicited responses.

Your instruments are stored in the site:

This is how the instrument looks like:

And one of the options for results is the general average of the whole test, and the general average of each section and aspect included in these sections.

Other options for data analysis are: averages by question, and text data, you can also see the raw data, and can do crosstabulations too. Tables can be easily exported to Excell.

One important aspect to have in mind is that the objective for the use of the instruments needs to be very clear, so that you can modify the instrument to meet your needs without distorting the concept under which this instrument was originally designed.

 This is all for now, if you know of other online survey or test creators, let me know!

Daf

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