Welcome to the April digital experience insight blog post. These monthly blogs provide general tips and advice on how to run the insight process, latest best practice and guidance, as well as the latest news in and around the area of staff and student digital experience insights.
- Six simple steps to get your survey launched in under one hour!
Are you new to digital insights? Its not too late to launch your surveys!
Have you copied, customised and launched your insight survey(s) yet?
If not, don’t worry. Here are six simple steps to get your survey launched in under one hour.
Step 1: log into your Jisc online surveys account and take a look at the master insight survey(s)
- Log to the Jisc online surveys page (opens in new window).
- Email address required. Password required. Sign in. Forgotten password or lost invitation?
- If you’ve mislaid your login details, just click on “lost invitation” to trigger a new one
- Once you’re inside your Jisc online survey dashboard, de-select “just my surveys” to see the survey we have placed there for you (as per the handy green text box at the top of the dashboard)
Step 2: copy from the master surveys(s)
- You will have access to the master survey(s) you requested in the ‘getting started’ form
- Take a copy of these using the purple “copy” icon on the dashboard
- Name your insight survey: [name of your institution] [HE/FE/HE online/FE online student and/or teaching staff] [2018/19] [insight survey]
- If you’re using the Welsh version, please indicate either by putting the title in Welsh or adding “(Welsh)” into the title
- Remove the word “locked”
- Our downloadable guide on using insights surveys in Jisc online surveys (opens in new window) contains more information on how to copy your master survey(s)
Step 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 share this group data with you all (allowing you to compare your institution against “all data” in the benchmark)However, you can make the following edits:
However, you can make the following edits:
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- Customise question 28 (page 12) of the student survey to allow you to group your institutional respondents in a way that makes sense to you (eg by broad subject area of study, by campus etc)
- Customise or delete question 27 (page 12) of the student survey or question 20 (page 11) of the staff survey which offers further questions or prompts on an ‘agree, neutral, disagree’ scale
- Add an alternative or additional question on page 12 (of the student survey) or page 11 (of the staff survey) if you feel confident to do so.
- Our downloadable guide on customising your insights survey (opens in new window) contains more information.
Step 4: check the survey(s) 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
Step 5: launch your survey(s)
- 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
- Our downloadable guide on using insights surveys in Jisc online surveys (opens in new window) contains more information on how to launch your survey(s).
Step 6: engage with your student and staff to ensure a reliable and valid sample size
- To get data that reflects true opinions from your student or staff population as a whole, you should aim to collect responses from at least 20% of all students or staff, or target a sub-sample that contains all student variation in opinion and get responses from everyone in this sub-sample (eg by walking into some lectures with a box of chocolates and kindly asking everyone to complete the survey on their smart phones in return for chocolate!). Or you could do both
- You could share the public url link with your students eg in lectures, on twitter, via the student union, via their tutors
- Several institutions have decided to run their surveys in a single given month and to make this “digital student” month. They are engaging learners with posters and sharing initial findings whilst the survey(s) are still live. Is this something you want to consider?
- Our downloadable guide has more information on engaging respondents in your insights surveys (opens in new window).
- Some tools to make your life easier when it comes to analysing and presenting your data
For those that have completed collecting your data via Jisc online surveys, the next stage will be analysing, presenting, as well as publishing your results. To help you we have produced some handy tools to help simplify the task, for both the student, as well as the new teaching staff surveys.
These include an Excel spreadsheet where you can drop in your data to produce graphs and tables. Secondly a PowerPoint presentation where you can place these graphs and tables (and much more), so you can present the results, and lastly some poster templates to help publicise your results within your institution. These can all be found on the blog titled some tools to make your life easier when it comes to analysing and presenting your data (opens in new window).
- Agenda released for the community of practice – 22 May 2019
The agenda for the next community of practice on the 22 May has now been released and can be found on our community of practice event page (opens in new window). The event will include a keynote speech by Professor Colin Bryson (Director of the Combined Honours Centre, Newcastle University) on the ‘the value of student engagement’. The second keynote speech will be by Hannah Mathias of Cardiff and Vale College on ‘the longitudinal value of insights data informing digital developments’. Places are still available and this event is free to attend but delegates must register via our community of practice event page (opens in new window).
- Reminder to close all student insight surveys by the 30 April (and teaching staff survey by the 28 June)
A quick reminder for those who are running the student survey this year. This survey closes on the 30 April so can I ask those of you who currently have the survey open (or plan to open the survey very soon) to set the close date to the 30 April 2019. This is important because any student surveys that have not closed by this date will not be able to access the national benchmark score for their respective survey, nor have their data included in the national report.
Also note that the teaching staff survey closes on the 28 June so the relevant surveys will also need to be closed at this date.
To change the close date within Jisc online surveys, you need to find the relevant survey, click on ‘distribute’ and then ‘distribution settings’ and change the closing date to the 30 April 2019 (or 28 June 2019 for your teaching staff surveys). Note you also need to click on ‘save’ at the bottom of the screen to make sure the change is made.
Please also note the closing data for Welsh Further Education colleges will be different so please contact help@jisc.ac.uk (putting ‘insight surveys’ in the subject line) for further information.
