As you’ll know by now, there’s plenty of ‘slow’ guidance to customising and launching the tracker from our Guidance page. But if you’re confident about your aims for the tracker, you’ve got your key stakeholders involved, and you’ve used BOS before, you might not need that much detail. This six-step quick guide is for you (with thanks once again to Tabetha and Mike for the content).
1. Log into your BOS account and take a look at the master tracker(s)
- The BOS login page is https://admin.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/accounts/login/
- Sign in using your log-in details: if you’ve mislaid them, just click on “lost invitation” to get new credentials.
- Once you’re in the BOS dashboard, de-select “just my surveys” to see the master tracker(s) that you requested (see the handy green text box at the top of the dashboard if you’re stuck).
2. Copy from the master tracker(s)
- Copy your master tracker(s) using the purple “copy” icon on the dashboard
- Name your new tracker(s) with your institution name AND whether it is the FE, HE, Skills, Online or ACL version
- Remove the word “locked”
3. Customise your survey questions
Most questions cannot be edited, because we need them to be identical so we can group everyone’s data and allow you to compare your institution against “all data” in the group (after surveys close at the end of April 2018).
However, you can make the following edits:
- Page 6 (name your VLE in the section header above Q15)
- Add questions to Page 9 and remove the red text instruction boxes
- Edit the “thank you” text on Page 10
4. Check the survey before you launch it!
- Once you press LAUNCH you can’t edit the survey, so make sure you check it carefully first
- You can create and share a PDF of the survey by going to “Preview Survey” and clicking on the cog in the top right of the screen – this allows you to test it with users and run it past key stakeholders before launching.
5. Launch your tracker
- From the dashboard click on DISTRIBUTE
- Check that you are happy with “public URL” link address (if not you can change it under “distribution settings”)
- You can change the close date if you want to. Surveys close finally on 30th April 2018 when we merge the data in “benchmark” groups, but you can choose a date before then. We recommend a survey window of 2-3 weeks.
6. Get a reliable and valid sample size from your learners
- To get data that reflects true opinions from your learner population as a whole, you should aim to collect responses from at least 20% of all students, or target a sub-sample that contains all student variation and get responses from everyone in this sub-sample (e.g. by walking into some lectures with a box of chocolates and asking everyone to complete the survey on their smart phones in return for a sweet reward!). Or you could do both.
- You could share the public URL link with your learners e.g. in lectures, on twitter, via the student union, via their tutors (see blog post on engaging students)
- Several institutions have decided to run their surveys in a single month and to make this “digital student” month. They are engaging learners with posters and events, and sharing initial findings whilst the tracker is still live. Is this something you want to consider?
- If you don’t get enough responses in the time allocated, consider extending by a week and trying a different engagement strategy.And finally… a reminder that there is lots more help available on our Tracker website pages. The blog and loads of guidance material all cascade from the tracker landing page.