[637] in magellan
biweekly report: Web Surveys Discovery Project
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jagruti S. Patel)
Wed Apr 25 16:06:40 2001
Message-Id: <200104252006.QAA15624@melbourne-city-street.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 16:05:54 -0400
To: magellan@mit.edu
From: "Jagruti S. Patel" <jag@MIT.EDU>
Cc: web-surveys@mit.edu
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Project Name: Web Survey Discovery
Project Leader: Jag Patel
Report Date: 25 April 2001
Project Notebook: http://web.mit.edu/is/discovery/web-surveys/
Accomplishments of the past period:
- Created and refined client needs document with questions for interviews &
focus groups
- Sent invitations to students and staff to three focus groups, with a
"pre-focus group questionnaire" so we can reduce the number of questions
(http://web.mit.edu/is/discovery/web-surveys/survey.html)
- Began best practice research at peer institutions, searching for survey
resources & guidelines
- Contacted Stanford & MIT TLO about looking at Stanford's survey code,
especially for survey creation
- Jeff Schiller hosted the Athletics Survey with a survey system he wrote
and hosted; good response rate from students
Goals for the coming period:
- Continue identifying focus group attendees and potential interviewees
- Meet with Gary Dryfoos & Harold Pakulat about interest in project
- Hold student focus group on May 3; prepare for admin/faculty focus groups
on May 11 & 14
- Meet with sponsor (Phil Clay)
- Follow up with TLO for Stanford code agreement
- Firm up Discovery project schedule
Issues:
- Need to think through any issues around having Perseus for Information
Systems use. Perseus is a package that IS bought for the Customer
Satisfaction Survey, running on NT, which creates the survey forms or
emails surveys, collects data, does real-time analysis, and eases
post-survey analysis. Rob Smyser and Rocklyn Clarke are the contacts for
this, and we will need to check in soon. The biggest difference between
Perseus and the suggested goals for this project are in the analysis tool -
so far, the web survey project has goals around improving communication
around surveys, data collection, and archiving, but leaves the analysis to
the web survey client / sponsor.
Key learnings:
- A number of commercial survey packages exist, but most of them are hosted
by the company, or run only on NT web servers
- Issues around coordinating surveys will come up a lot in this project.
For example, 3 surveys were sent to students around the same time:
Athletics, Mental Health, and the Cycles survey sponsored by COFE, hosted
by Indiana.
Team dynamics:
- Good; it feels great to get this project moving.
Additional comments:
- None.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jag Patel
MIT Information Systems
jag@mit.edu
ph: 617.253.8167
