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CTLT has been developing a new online survey tool to meet our needs to administer online course evaluations on a large scale. This work is funded in part by a FIPSE grant (BeTA) in collaboration with the TLT Group. One of the by-products we have found in the system we are calling “Survey to make a survey.”
The general idea is that one survey is used to gather information needed to create a second survey and that the data from the first survey can be moved into the second survey by simple, mostly automatic processes: the data in an Excel report coming from the first survey is transformed using Excel functions to be the data needed to create a variant of the survey for a group of respondents in the second survey.
Our first implementation of this idea is a survey exploring instructors’ (largely informal) mid-course formative assessments. The goal was to learn about good practices faculty employ, offer opportunities to learn about other practices, AND, learn which faculty would like to have a formal mid-term course evaluation administered online.
This “survey to make a survey” technique has many possible applications. In describing Matrix Surveys examples, the TLT Group gives an example in the section “Using a Survey of Faculty to Create a Matrix Survey of their Students”
An even more elaborate application of the technique would be to implement our ideas of a transformed grade book. In that example, there are several surveys that are linked to one another and that are used to report results to multiple audiences. This might be done in the semi-automatic means described above, but for uses on a large scale, the linkages enabling survey creation will require greater automation.
