Creating and Managing Surveys May 2014 Survey Software
Contents 1. INTRODUCTION 2 2. HOW TO ACCESS THE SURVEY SOFTWARE 3 The User Profile 3 3. GETTING STARTED ON A NEW SURVEY 5 4. FURTHER WORK ON SURVEY 12 5. DEPLOYING THE SURVEY 20 6. REPORT AND ANALYSIS 21 7. CONCLUSION 23 8. FURTHER INFORMATION 23 Format Conventions Feedback In this document the following format conventions are used: Computer output is given in a Courier font. Input which is to be typed by you is in bold Input which must be replaced by your details is given in bold italics. Keys that you press are bold. Menu options and buttons are given in an Arial font. Notes are indicated by a bulleted book. a note Password a:\setup LOGIN user_name Enter File New Tips are indicated by a bulleted flag. This is a tip Warnings are indicated by a bulleted bomb. This is a warning The Computing Services Department welcomes feedback on its documentation. If you notice any mistakes in this document, or if you wish to make any suggestions on how the document could be improved, please contact Steven Tapril, Information Officer. Electronic mail should be sent to the email address taprils@liv.ac.uk
1. Introduction The SelectSurvey.NET software makes it easy to create an online survey. You can use it for simple surveys (for example, quick evaluation of courses) and for more elaborate surveys which only ask relevant questions, based on previous responses. Once a survey is completed and released, individual survey results can be analysed reports with graphs and tables can be produced from all the results complete set of results can be exported to SPSS or to Excel for further analysis. Note that there is a template designed for this University so that the look is standardised. Colours, fonts, borders are uniform throughout the University. Some of the features are as follows: 21 different question types and there are Question libraries. Option for single or multiple responses per user Optionally require an answer for any question and specify a default value for any question or specify minimum and maximum answer values Ability to edit surveys by copying existing surveys, copying pages within a survey, copying existing questions from the same survey or from another survey owned by the current user Answer piping to subsequent pages and you can have calculated questions, using values from other answers. 100% script-based ASP code Ability to set page conditions on each page or assign multiple conditions per page or skip to Page Condition Display progress using a customizable progress bar Option to display or hide the "Back" button on each survey Ability to specify the action to take when the user clicks the Cancel button in a survey Specify any action or custom message or redirect to any URL when a user completes a survey Ability to filter report results based on answers to questions or on user attributes CSV/Excel data export in raw data format or in an SPSS compliant format CSV/Excel data export with individual user responses on each row Graphical reporting with bar graphs but can display other charts or graphs eg pie charts. Summary report of all responses including lists of individual responses and can view all individual responses For the complete list of features, please see the web page at http://www.classapps.com/selectsurveyfeatures.asp Note that the SelectSurvey.NET software is only available to members of staff. Normally, permission is automatically granted to members of staff who apply for access but other users (for example, research postgraduates) have to apply for special permission. 2
2. How to Access the Survey Software You will need to be given access to the Survey Software. Please contact the Helpdesk (email helpdesk@liv.ac.uk) in the first instance. Your username will be added to the software and an email will be sent to you advising you of this. The first task is to log on and to look at the user profile. The User Profile Summary of Exercise: This exercise involves the following major tasks: Logging in to the SelectSurvey.NET Service Looking at the User Profile A full set of instructions for completing the tasks is given below: Logging in to the SelectSurvey.NET Service Log on the Managed Windows Service, using your MWS username and double click the Internet Explorer icon. Open the web page http://survey.liv.ac.uk/login Log on using your usual MWS username and password. In the text on the next panel, it says...click here to create or manage surveys... This is the one you want to choose since you are about to create a new survey. 3
You should then see the following screen: 4
3. Getting Started on a New Survey You are about to start a new survey to evaluate a course. This particular exercise is just to show you the basic ways of creating questions. Summary of Exercise: This exercise involves the following major tasks. Creating a new Survey Setting some Preferences Inserting some Questions Previewing the Survey A full set of instructions for completing the tasks is given below: Creating a new Survey Click Create New Survey near the top on the right. Give a title this will appear as the survey title which users will see when they come to take the survey. The title in the above is as follows: Evaluation of Course ABC123 for Undergraduates Year 1 Click From Scratch (there should be no other surveys). then click Save Setting some Preferences On the next page, click Edit. Most of the preferences will be pretty meaningless at this stage but here are a few to note. Take a look at the options for the General tab. The Status is currently set as Design this means the survey can be edited. You can change this to Closed or Archived/ Closed means that the survey can no longer be edited and it is usually selected when you are ready to publish your survey. Archived means you are ready to delete the survey little information on this in the help pages! 5
Now click the Display tab this is more important. Please select Default Template for the template if it is not already selected. Also choose Display Progress as Page X of Y format for the Page Numbering.. Have a look at the other options but leave them as they are. Notice that you can choose to show or hide the Back and Save buttons on a survey. Also, there are various options available for the Cancel button including directing survey users to another web page. For the moment, we are not interested in the other tabs so click Save. You are returned to your list of surveys. We will be discussing some of the other functions such as Deploy later when we are ready to publish the survey. We want to return to the design of the survey so click the Design symbol. Inserting some Questions Here is a picture of the 1 st page of the survey you are about to create. Before starting the procedure of building this survey, please note the following: 6
The survey name is at the top of the page There is one text box where the user types his name. It is not a Required field. There are two questions which require Yes or /No answers. Answers to both of these questions are Required you need to decide for yourself whether giving a default value is a good idea! You may prefer to make the user select one of the two options. The last question could have been done in a number of ways. For example a simple number box would have been satisfactory if there was some descriptive explanation. Or a set of radio buttons would have been a good alternative. In the next few exercises, once you have finshed creating Page 1 of this survey, you will be learning how to enhance the survey with other pages. Also, you will learn how to move to different pages according to whether the student picks Yes or No to Q2, Q3 etc. Another technique will be to learn how to Pipe data that has been input from one page to subsequent pages. Click Insert and click the down arrow by Please Select. There is plenty of choice! You will meet a few of these during the exercise and it is easy to experiment with the rest once you have mastered the basics. 7
For the first question, choose Open Ended One Line Fill in all the boxes with the text as above. Note the Alias for this field is Name this will appear as a header in the report instead of the full question.. Scroll to bottom and click Save. The following should then appear. We are ready to create the next question now. Do not click Insert on this question since it would insert a question before this one. Instead, go to the bottom and click Insert there. Note that if your questions are in the wrong order, use the Up and Down arrows to move questions around. 8
For the next question, you want a Choice -Yes/No question. Fill in boxes as shown in figure above. Notice there should be a tick by Required and there is a default value of Yes. Also change the Display type from a dropdown box to Radio Buttons-Horizontal. Create the third question yourself look at the figure showing Page 1 of the survey for details. Give an alias of Complete. For the last question, choose Open Ended Number Slider. There are alternative methods of acquiring the information required. For example, radio buttons could be used with text such as Extremely difficult or Extremely easy etc. The slider is used instead of these other options just for illustration purposes! See the next page for how the rest of the dialog should look. Note that the picture has been doctored slightly to improve its appearance. 9
When this has been finished, you should have the following at the bottom. Previewing the Survey Click Done then click the name of the Survey to have a preview. If you receive a message that the survey is not live, then return and make sure that the status of the survey is Open and that the Manage option is Close. Try the survey yourself and click Done at the end then click Close. Do not click Logoff unless you really want to logoff from the survey software. 10
To do further work on the survey, click the Design icon. A message appears: This survey has at least one response. Only limited changes are allowed on a survey with responses. To fully edit this survey, you must first delete all of the responses, which can be done by clicking here If you try to do further work on the survey, there are only limited options. So you should click Here as instructed and delete all responses. 11
4. Further Work on Survey In this section, we see how to move to different pages depending on the answers given on the 1st page of the survey done in the previous section. For instance you might like to ask further questions of anyone who is re-sitting the module or who did not complete the exercises or who found it too difficult or who found it too easy! We also need to add some descriptive material to each page so we can inform survey users why we are asking these particular questions. Summary of Exercise: This exercise involves the following major tasks: Adding descriptions to pages Creating a new page Creating another new page Setting page conditions Creating more new pages (optional) Setting further page conditions (optional) Piping on last page A full set of instructions for completing the tasks is given below: Adding Descriptions to Pages You should be in Design mode. Notice it says No Title Entered. Click Edit Page Properties. See below for what you can type for the Page Introduction and then click Save. Creating a New Page Scroll down to the bottom and click New Pg. This inserts a new page after the first page. Be warned: if you click the New Pg button at the top, you will insert a page in front of the original page instead of after If you find that pages are in the wrong order, then look for the Move Page button at the top. If this is not visible, you are probably editing a question so click Done (or Cancel) and then you will be returned to a page of the survey. We are now going to create the following page for all participants. This will give you some practice with other question types. 12
Choose Choice One Answer (Option Buttons) for the question type. Fill in the other boxes as in picture below. 13
For the next question (on Page 2!), choose Matrix - One Answer per row (Option Buttons) for the question type. Fill in the other boxes as below. The last two questions on this page are Open Ended -Comments Boxes and are relatively straightforward to create so no further instructions are given. Give aliases of Improvements for 1 st comments box one and Extra for 2 nd. Also add a page title For All Participants Creating another New Page We want a new page between the current Pages 1 and 2. Click the Page 1 tab near the top, scroll to the bottom and click the New Pg button. Construct the two questions as shown in following picture. 14
Setting Page Conditions The first condition after P1 is: If student is not doing a repeat, then Page 2 is skipped We shall deal with other conditions later. Click the Page 2 tab then click Insert Page Conditions. Choose the question about whether it is the 1 st time the course is being taken from the list of questions. Then choose Equal To for the operator, choose Yes for the answer and then Skip to Page 3. Notice that the condition is stored in Group1. Click Insert then click Done and then Done again. Try the survey at least twice. What happens when you click Yes or No for the repeat question? Creating more New Pages (optional) Delete any responses. Create two more pages shown below to follow Page 1. You can of course construct more pages to cover different students for instance, those students who found the course too easy! But it is now time to set some page conditions so that different students see different pages. 15
So far you should have 5 pages in this order. 1. Welcome 2. For students who may need to see lecturer 3. Some students may have to repeat course 4. For Repeat Students 5. For all participants Setting Further Page Conditions (optional) On Page 2, students who need to see the lecturer are those who are repeating the course and who did not finish the exercises. They do not take further part in the survey. On Page 3, those students who did not finish the exercises and found it extremely difficult (difficulty value of 1) are told they will be permitted to retake the course. They can then take the rest of the survey. The new Page 4 did have a condition set when it was page 2 of 3 but, because the page has been moved, the condition needs checking again. When designing pages, it is better to have all the pages worked out and in correct place before setting page conditions. So you have to check later what conditions are placed on page 4 and reset them if necessary. Click the Page 2 tab then click Insert Page Conditions. Read the information at the top of the page about setting conditions. This may be slightly confusing to begin with but hopefully after proceeding through this section, it will be clearer. Some advice though:- it is sometimes better to organise your conditions in this way. If condition is true then do a no skip else skip to next page If you do it the other way round by saying If condition is true then skip to another page else do a no skip then it will skip to the page regardless of any conditions that you have set on that page, which may not be what you want! The conditions for Page 2 are that the student is repeating the course AND did not complete the exercises. Otherwise the student skips to the next page. For the first condition, choose the question about whether it is the 1 st time the course is being taken from the list of questions. Then choose Equal To for the operator, choose No for the answer and then NoSkips. Click Insert We need to put the second condition in the same group since it is in condition 1 AND condition 2 16
Choose the question about whether all the exercises were completed from the list of questions. Then choose Equal To for the operator, choose No for the answer, make sure it is still Group1 for the Group and then No Skips. When finished, the list of conditions should look like the following: Then try the survey. To test it thoroughly, you would have to give a few different combinations to make sure that all the possible paths are covered. But we have not finished setting page conditions so just try the survey a couple of times for now. We now look at Page 3. We want only those students who are not repeating the course AND who did not complete their exercises AND who said it was extremely difficult (value = 1) to go to Page 3. Insert three conditions for page 3 so that the list of conditions looks like the following. Note that again all the conditions are put into the same group. Insert two conditions for Page 4 so that the list of conditions looks like the following. This is for repeat students who completed the exercises. Finally, insert two conditions for Page 5 so that the list of conditions looks like the following. These are to stop those students who repeated the course and who did not complete the exercises from completing this page. Notice that these students have also been prevented from seeing Page 3 and 4 also from the conditions set for those pages. 17
This is the first example of two groups being set up. The condition for showing the page is either for students who are not repeating OR for students who finish the exercises. You should try the survey a number of times to make sure you test all possible paths through the survey. You could also add a couple of pages and add some new conditions if you want. Piping on Last Page You may have noticed that one of the options for each question is Pipe. Look at the 1st question on Page 1. We can pipe the answer from this question to the Thank you page at the end of the survey. Click Pipe which is by that question. A box pops up like the one on the next page. Select the text and then press CTRL and C keys together to copy the text. Click Close on the Answer piping box and then click Done at the bottom of the page to return to the Manage Survey page. To reach the end page of the survey, click the Options icon and then click the Completion tab. Towards the middle (under Completion Message), you can see a message Thank you for taking the survey. Click after the Thank you and add two commas then in between the commas press CTRL and V keys together to do a paste of the text copied from the Pipe operation. See below. Of course, you can change the text to add your own messages. 18
Click Save at the bottom of the page. When you take the survey, you will see your name appearing on the last page of the survey as shown below. 19
5. Deploying the Survey There are a number of options for publicising the survey. We will cover a couple of these here. Go to the Manage Surveys page and click Deploy on the same line as the survey you have been working on. We are more interested in sending an email link and in putting the link to the survey on a web page than in the other options. Select the first text (under Email link), press CTRL and C keys together and then paste this text in an email to yourself. Read the email and click on the link. You should be able to take the survey. Select the second text (under Web page, Pop-up, or Email lists), press CTRL and C keys together and then paste this text on an HTML page. See below for an example. You can use Sharepoint Designer or even Notepad to create this simple HTML page. Notice that the text to appear with the link has been changed from Survey to Evaluation of Course. (The HTML code has been made quite small in order to fit the lines to the paper width - sorry!) <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Invitation to take a survey for Module ABC123</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY BGCOLOR="#D5DB5F"> <H2>For Undergraduates in Year 1 who have taken the course module ABC123</H2> <P>This survey should take only a few minutes. Thanks!</P> <HR> <a href="http://survey.liv.ac.uk/takesurvey.aspx?surveyid=m4l2864">evaluation of Course</a> </BODY> </HTML> Open a browser (Internet Explorer for example), open the web page and click on the link to take the survey. Before actually releasing the survey, you should clear all of your survey tests! First, do the next exercise on producing a report and then click Clear on the Manage Surveys page. If you want to publish your survey to users outside the University then you can make the link to the survey more user-friendly. Ask at CSD helpdesk for advice about how to do this. 20
6. Report and Analysis There are a number of options for producing a report, including custom made reports in which you select the question responses to include in the report. However, since it is a fairly trivial procedure to produce a report, we just show you the basics here. Click Reports near the top. Then click Survey Overview, Individual Response Reports, Data Export Choose the name of the survey you have been working on then click go You are presented with a list of individual responses. You can see how each individual responded but you might be more interested in seeing an overall view. Click Results Overview. You can browse thru the results. For instance you might see something like the picture below. If you want to output the results for further Analysis to MS Excel or to SPSS then click Export Data near top on right. A large dialog box appears. Ensure the answers near the top are as follows: Export Format: CSV Excel Data Format: User Responses Scroll to the bottom and click Export. Save the file suggested default is UserResponses.csv. Here is the UserResponses.csv file in MS Excel. There are very few comments in this report from testing the survey! Students will probably be more forthright in a real survey so those columns for comments will not look as bare as they do below... 21
You can also save in a format for import into SPSS. Remember, before actually releasing the survey, you should clear all of your survey tests! Click Clear on the Manage Surveys page. 22
7. Conclusion We have attempted in this workbook to show some of the facilities available in SelectSurvey.NET. However, there are a lot of facilities that we have not mentioned; for example, Some of the more complex question types and the Question libraries. Option for single or multiple responses per user (click the Options icon on the Manage Surveys page and look at the Access tab) Ability to edit surveys by copying existing surveys, copying pages within a survey, copying existing questions from the same survey or from another survey owned by the current user. This is fairly trivial anyway once you see there is a Copy button! Calculated questions, using values from other answers (look at Piping on the Help pages for this. 100% script-based ASP code (look at Advanced Validation on the Help pages for this) Specify any action or custom message or redirect to any URL when a user completes a survey (go to Manage Surveys page then click Options and the Completion tab.) Ability to filter report results based on answers to questions or on user attributes. (You have to create a Custom report to do this but it is fairly straightforward). Graphical reporting with bar graphs but can display other charts or graphs eg pie charts. (go to Manage Surveys page then click Options then click the Report tab) If you need help with SelectSurvey.NET, you can contact the Helpdesk in Computing Services. 8. Further Information The following web page should be read for more information about SelectSurvey.NET: This reference below is a full tutorial for using all facilities in SelectSurvey.NET. http://www.classapps.com/documentation/selectsurveynettrainingmanual.pdf 23