Course Outline

Offered by Networked Information Services

Instructor: George Gaudette (gaudette@bu.edu)
Prerequisites: Forms: Introduction (or equivalent knowledge)
2 hours (50 minutes lecture, 45 minutes hands-on exercises, 10-minute break)

Introduction (10 minutes)

1. Goals of the course
2. Why would you want to use a web survey?
3. Benefits of an online survey
4. Overview of how to publish surveys at BU

Methods of administering web-based surveys (15 minutes)

1. Administering public surveys for anonymous respondents: example, benefits and drawbacks
2. Administering access-restricted surveys for anonymous respondents: example, benefits and drawbacks
3. Administering access-restricted surveys for non-anonymous respondents: example, benefits and drawbacks

Creating a survey with HTML and PonyExpress (10 minutes)

1. Making your form work with PonyExpress
2. Activating your data directory to allow data to be written there
3. Adding auto-completing fields based on login name for non-anonymous surveys

Hands-on activity: Preparing your classroom environment (10 minutes)

1. Using Dreamweaver, define a site definition for connecting to your practice site.
2. Download practice files from your site.
3. Open the sample survey for editing.
4. Set preferences for Code View (Word Wrap, Line Numbering).

Break (10 minutes)

Hands-on exercise: Creating and publishing a survey (25 minutes)

1. Review the tag specifying the order in which fields will be output.
2. Specify whether the survey should send a respondent's data to an e-mail address when the survey is submitted.
3. Specify an e-mail address the survey should send mail to (even if the survey does not send mail each time the survey is submitted).
4. Specify the URL of the page to show after respondents submit the form.
5. Specify the location of the folder for your output data (and for templates, if you use them).
6. Specify that the survey writes to a datafile.
7. Give the datafile a custom filename (optional).
8. Indicate whether the datafile should use a header row (optional).
9. Indicate whether the survey should output only select fields to the datafile (optional).
10. Synchronize the live practice site with your local files and test your survey online.

Important tips: Suggestions and potential pitfalls (10 minutes)

1. Designing your form to produce easily sorted and tabulated data
2. Managing multiple submissions from repeat respondents
3. Avoiding data corruption caused by checkboxes
4. Preventing data corruption caused by changes to form
5. Protecting your data
6. Activating your directory

Analyzing your data (5 minutes)

1. Choosing a database or spreadsheet
2. Demonstration: importing into an Excel spreadsheet

Hands-on exercise: Importing a datafile into Excel (10 minutes)

1. Using Dreamweaver, download your datafile in your practice site.
2. Using Microsoft Excel, set the file type to open and select your datafile for importing.
3. Use Excel's Text Import Wizard, open your datafile as a tab-delimited file.
4. As time allows, experiment with sorting data by column or computing tabular data.

Supplementary Material: Methodological issues (not covered during the class)

For your reference, we have compiled a brief list of articles about methodological issues to keep in mind when conducting surveys.