Online Survey

As with most of the other programs we have used in the past weeks, using the survey sites was as easy as providing an email address and password. I used zoomerang.com to create my survey. I suspect it is similiar to some of the others in that a person can create their own survey or use an existing template. I used a combination of the two. I created five questions to mix in with five other questions provided in one of the templates provided at zoomerang. It was very easy to edit the existing template and create your own survey. The basic subscription does not provide as many bells and whistles as the paid versions but it is enough to create a simple survey and analyze the data. A drawback to the free version was that I could not share the results with anyone, as I would have liked to do that. The site does the work. It lists the number of completed surveys and breaks down the results using percentages. As of Saturday night, I had seven completed surveys. Zoomerang also gave me the choice of sending the survey by email or pasting the link in a website or blog. It really could not have been easier. It was interesting to see the results of my survey. The answers were all over the board!!!
Advantages of online surveys would include access to individuals in distant locations, the ability to reach difficult to contact participants, and the convenience of having automated data collection, which reduces researcher time and effort. Online surveys allow researchers to reach thousands of people with common characteristics in a short amount of time, despite being separated by great geographic distances. Online surveys can also save money by moving to an electronic medium from a paper format, eliminating the cost of paper, postage ,printing, and data entry,etc. A specific example of educational use of a survey would be, for example, an initial poll to get an idea of students computer skills. This could aid the instructor in the initial lesson plans, where to start from, after considering the computer skills of the students, e.g., 1.) Have you used Microsoft Word?, 2.) Have you used PowerPoint? Another example of the surveys are the post class surveys that ask questions about the class and the instructor, in an effort to evaluate the strengths or lacks of a particular class. I actually enjoyed taking the surveys from other students as I do not always share this same enthusiasm about taking other online surveys, as I am not sure if they actually want our opinion...

Here is the link to my survey http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229GJK2CZS8