student course evaluation project

[George Vidalis <Ge...@its.monash.edu.au>]

Hi all. First up - I'm not a programmer. I'm researching for an online 
survey and data analysis tool for Monash University, Australia.
Our developers are keen on a Perl solution. So far MOD_Survey looks like 
a good front end. If we can find some MOD_Perl modules to do some of the 
other stuff we need our developers could put a package together. It 
would be great to put together a MOD_Perl survey tool that also has 
powerful gathering, reporting and analysis capability.

I have included a wish list of our requirements, hopefully they'll make 
enough sense to give you an idea of what we're after. If anyone knows of 
a single MOD (or even any Perl) package or any useful MOD modules to 
building a package I would be most grateful for your info.

Wishlist:

*Questions* based on a standardised 5-point scale (strongly agree -> 
strongly disagree) + don’t know/unable to judge and doesn’t 
apply/inappropriate.
*Flexibility*: We would like to create survey form templates that can be 
easily adapted by untrained academic staff, to satisfy differing 
evaluation requirements across various units. This may involve adding or 
subtracting questions from the survey.

*Distribute and Gathering*:

* Generate Scantron/Word document (could be PDF and published online)
* Configure: optional reminders; notifications; closing dates, etc.
* Define respondent grouping based on student or unit attributes
* Notify respondents: email, messaging
* Reports on responses and response rates inc. timestamp (into
database…?)
* Ticketing facility for identifying non-respondents
* Capacity for distinguishing between cohorts based on LDAP
attributes/ Sending them different questionnaires / Interactive
questionnaires with branching
* Support both qualitative and quantitative questions / Process for
removing identifying information
* Massage data from scan sheets into the database
* Generate scan sheets from electronic surveys
* Audit trails (date completed, etc.)

**Reporting and analysis:**

* Access control: initially only at Faculty level (further access
control offline)
* User enquiries (standard database for arbitrary reports)
* Access to past reports / saved queries
* Queries students or by question
* Simple reports should happen within a minute, complex reports can
happen within 24 hours
* Time-series analyses require ad hoc access for last five years
* Compare against previous time taught
* Compare against same teaching period previous year
* Analysis of both qualitative and quantitative questions
* Qualitative looks for frequently repeated words/sentences to
identify themes of feedback
* Audit trails (reports run, by whom, etc.)
* Unique identification of reports (timestamp)
* Extract data in an Excel-friendly format (.csv/.xls)
 >>>

Many thanks for taking the time to look this over. Cheers. GeorgeV.

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Re: student course evaluation project

[Perrin Harkins <pe...@elem.com>]

On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 08:27, George Vidalis wrote:
> If we can find some MOD_Perl modules to do some of the 
> other stuff we need our developers could put a package together. It 
> would be great to put together a MOD_Perl survey tool that also has 
> powerful gathering, reporting and analysis capability.

The things on your requirements list are all relatively easy for someone
with mod_perl experience, although they would take time to build.  I
don't know of any single package that is already built.  There is the
CGI::MxScreen module on CPAN that does some of this:
http://search.cpan.org/~ram/CGI-MxScreen-0.1.1/MxScreen.pm

Otherwise, you might check on http://freshmeat.net/.

- Perrin


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