Method 11, Survey Says!

This module was about online survey tools. There are many out there, ranging to the cheap and limited to the expensive and powerful.

Although my eyes started to glaze over, which I tend to do with mindless statistics, once I saw a nice screencast tutorial about how you can create your own form this discovery lesson became more interesting. There can be a lot of prep work creating the right kind of questions as well as making sense of the responses after. There are helping hands to guide in both directions with many online articles and screencasts.

Looking around our online page, my library has a basic “how are we doing/please send feedback” form on the main home page. The campus often solicits responses to how a department or service is performing and to seek input to a proposed change. I have participated in a few over the last several years but have not been involved in either creating or analyzing them. In the library administration office, where I initially worked upon entering employment here, I have noticed they now use online forms to count those attending holiday luncheons. There was also an instant polls conducted after our annual new student library orientation; again, I was not involved but perhaps the first year students were able to answer with not only library computers but also their smart phones. So, there are a number of survey possibilities with various degrees of sophistication and application for each specific need. No more paper questionnaire routed by inter-department envelopes!