Training Presentation – Access Presentation and Links

It is very useful when you can gather information from other people in an efficient manner. Technology has certainly made this process easier. We are going to look at two tools that Miami provides to easily gather information from students, faculty, staff or those outside the University community. We will also look at how these tools can be used in some innovative ways.

Google Forms

Google Drive has a document called a form that can be created from the drive application. It has a relatively intuitive interface to create a variety of question formats:

Text — respondents provide short answers

Paragraph text — respondents provide longer answers

Multiple choice — respondents select one option from among several

Check boxes — respondents select as many options as they’d like

Choose from a list — respondents select one option from a dropdown menu

Scale — respondents rank something along a scale of numbers (e.g., from 1 to 5)

Grid — respondents select a point from a two-dimensional grid

In addition you can create section headers with instructions or page breaks. You can also copy a question if you have several of the same format which makes creating a survey or form quick and easy. You can also make questions required or not and create a custom message when participants are done.

All of the data from your form goes to a drive sheet which is a spreadsheet of your data. This can then be additionally manipulated or there is a tool to summarize the data. And since all of this “lives” in Google Drive, you can share it with whomever you wish.

Applications

The applications of this simple but powerful tool are endless. Not only can you use Forms to get feedback as in a traditional survey but you can use it to simply collect information. If you commonly collect personal information for a group or organization such as email addresses, phone numbers, address etc. A Google form makes that very quick and easy. I use to use it to keep track of my golf league members. Perhaps you want to collect some feedback at the end of an online module for a class. The link can be inserted at the end of the module, and you have a quick and easy way to collect their thoughts.

But that is not all that Google Forms can be used for. If you have a scoring rubric you like to use for a class project, you can create it in Google Forms and then use it to score each student project. You can add a formula in the spreadsheet that will then calculate the grades based on the rubric score. Here is some more information on using Forms for rubrics.

80 Interesting Uses of Google Forms

Collaboration Options for Google Forms

How to use Google Forms – Step by Step Guide

 

Qualtrics

Qualtrics is a more robust and sophisticated polling and survey tool. Miami has adopted it for research and other applications. But even if you want to do something fairly simple, it is pretty intuitive as well and allows you to quickly set up a survey or form. And again you can publish the link and gather your information very easily. In Qualtrics,  you can utilize over 100 ways to ask a question! The 17 major ways are below.

 

Question Types

MULTIPLE CHOICE

MATRIX TABLE

TEXT ENTRY

TEXT/GRAPHIC

CONSTANT SUM

SLIDER

SLIDING SCALE

RANK ORDER

PICK, GROUP, & RANK

SIDE BY SIDE

DRILL DOWN

HEAT MAP

HOT SPOT

GAP ANALYSIS

FILE UPLOAD

TIMING

META INFO QUESTION

CAPTCHA VERIFICATION

Explore the Question Type Guide

We won’t go over every type of question but Qualtrics has a University for comprehensive training. But there are some pretty interesting question types that could even be used to assess higher level thinking. You can also do branching surveys based on how a person responds to a question.

Applications

Qualtrics is such a robust tool that the only limitation is your imagination. It can be used for information information gathering as well as intricate research projects.

Miami Qualtrics Information

Qualtrics University Comprehensive Training Resources

• Basic Building
• Advanced Editing
• Distributing
• Reporting