iSean

so a few years ago i decided to spend a little of my professional development funds on SurveyMonkey. Surveymonkey.com is a site that provides a tool for making surveys. pretty simple stuff really, but they do the job they claim and they do it well. i first subscribed because i was tired of the end of semester evaluations that students complete getting turned in and then not getting the results until a month after the next semester started. if there were any changes recommended to improve my teaching and my classes then I would not get that feedback until well into the next semester. so i wanted to take matters into my own hands. i used my professional development money and subscribed to surveymonkey.com and have been using it ever since.

now that i am realizing the benefits of more instant feedback, particularly as compared to the typical end of semester evaluation, i am going overboard with surveys. i now use surveymonkey to conduct key formative assessments each week and my students complete for participation points. so every week i send out a survey of about 20 questions that range from the time my students spent on various components of the class to questions about the content that was taught that week to questions about how people are accessing my online sessions (e.g. dial-up, cable) to the kinds of equipment people are using and whether they are traveling, etc. — I try and get a nice profile of students, but I also ask about satisfaction levels with parts of the class. and i have open-ended questions about how they’d improve the session/class, etc. they are going to be future teachers so i like putting them in my shoes from time to time. a great thing about surveying my students at the end of the week and through the weekend is that i am now able to change my course and teaching nearly instantly instead of waiting for January. and next semester when i go to teach a particular lesson i can look back at the feedback my students made this past semester.

a nice thing about surveymonkey is that you can use it for free, right now. anyone can create an account and use the service for as long as you need for free as long as you are not getting more than 100 responses per survey (most of us don’t teach more than 30 or so in any given class). unfortunately, the free version only allows up to 10 questions per survey. but free is free. the professional and unlimited version is $200/year. i now have years of data collected in surveymonkey to compare and some of it is quite fascinating — e.g., i used to have nearly everyone on dial-up and now very few people have stuck with dial-up. i can’t reveal the specifics of my data because that would be considered publishing it and i haven’t gone through our institutional review board for human subjects review. i am actually on the IRB committee at my university so i need to be particularly careful.