Online testing support is available in Ambler-Johnston and Torgersen labs. These facilities may be scheduled for administration of online tests. For more information, contact Rob Dickert: rdickert@vt.edu or call 1-4810.
Create and administer your surveys with survey.vt.edu.
The Web Application Research and Development (WARD) department at Virginia Tech has developed a tool called survey.vt.edu that can be used to create and administer online surveys. It is available for use by VT students, faculty and staff at http://survey.vt.edu/.
This program allows you to create multiple choice questions that permit only one answer as well as questions that allow multiple answers. It also supports essay questions with either short (one-line) or longer answers. You can use html in headers and footers to enhance the appearance of your survey and create an exit page to provide information after the user has completed the questions.
After your survey is created, clicking a button allows you to make it available to users to start collecting responses. Results may be exported to your desktop computer for analysis with Excel, SAS, etc. WARD recommends that surveys be created using IE 5.5+ or Netscape 6.1+. Users taking a survey, however, should be able to use any browser.
Testing & Data Services encourages its clients to consider the advantages of administering surveys online. We will be happy to answer questions and help you get started using survey.vt.edu.
Learning Technologies has developed an online course evaluation system as an alternative to opscan data. For more information, contact Tom Head at tom.head@vt.edu or 1-6822.
College and department staff can save considerable time by administering evaluations online. Other universities using these systems have found that faculty and students also appreciate saving class time that used to be devoted to filling out forms. Students often produce more thoughtful responses and value the anonymity the computer offers over handwritten comments, while faculty find it much easier to read them in an online format.
Faculty often express concern that online evaluations are not comparable to opscans. Studies at other schools have not found consistent differences, and there has been no predominance of negative comments. Another concern is response rate, but periodic e-mail prompting and early attention to ensuring that students understand the importance of participation and the value placed on it by faculty and administrators can improve response rate considerably. It is worth noting that Testing & Data Services often sees opscans that have no marks or marks in decorative patterns that indicate the student had no interest in completing the evaluation, so a higher response rate doesn't necessarily produce good data.
The new Virginia Tech system controls the process at an administrative level which can be a college or department, as in the opscan system. Administrators choose questions and authorize faculty to add questions if desired. Administrators also control access time for students and faculty and e-mails to non-responders. They may produce standard analysis reports or download data to a comma-delimited file.