Calvin, Ogulcan, Rosa

Progress Report

11/12/14 – 11/18/14

This week we had less synchronous communication due to everyone having a busier work week and school week. However, this did not hinder the progress of our project as it is becoming more refined and streamlined. We are making a good amount of progression with our survey in terms of the types of questions we currently have that relate to what we want to measure.

One obstacle that we ran into while creating questions for the survey was the platform it was being created on. Our original intent was to create it on SurveyMonkey which offers a much more complex and visually appealing survey. However, the problem was that the basic version only allowed us to create up to 10 questions. If we want to create more, we would need to sign up for a “Pro” account which would require us to pay an inordinate subscription fee. Our solution to this problem was to create the survey with Google Forms instead. Although Google Forms does not provide the same amount of customizability as SurveyMonkey, it is sufficient enough to accomplish our task.

One discussion that we currently have is the length of the survey. We know students don’t prefer to spend a lot of time on surveys so what we plan to do is to administer the first iteration of our survey to our classmates and get their feedback. When they complete the survey;  at the bottom, we will prompt them to write in a comment box how long it took to complete, questions that might have been redundant or absent, and any suggestions/feedback they have that will help improve their survey experience.

What we hope to achieve from this is a couple of things. Our current iteration of the survey is not completely finished and it already seems lengthy. We are hoping to find ways to make it more concise through the help of our classmates.

For the division of labor, it was mostly the same since last week. Rosa focused on researching/creating questions that pertain to transfer rates while Ogulcan focused on research/creating questions around graduation rates. Calvin focused on creating the format of the survey and looked at other student engagement survey questions that might be relevant.