TECH TALK SESSION
Surveys are a great way to capture student feedback for your student services, but it can be hard to aggregate survey responses with actual student activity. We always recommend our clients use the survey functionality in Accudemia to collect student feedback. This feature lets users see the correlation of student satisfaction with the rest of their center’s traffic data, even if you collect responses anonymously. In this week’s Accudemia Tech Talk, Senior Support Specialist Nick Armstrong gave a crash course on setting up surveys in Accudemia.
Creating a Survey
The first step to collecting student feedback in Accudemia is to create the survey which you can do by navigating to Administration > Surveys from the main menu. When you create a new survey, you’ll have a few items to determine, including the name of your survey, how often it should display to users, and what triggers a survey to be shown to the user.
You’ll also determine the sign-in basis of the survey which is commonly the subject you want to gather more information about (for example, a specific location, service, course, or tutor). Surveys can display during sign-in or sign-out at a kiosk, and they can also trigger when a user logs into their Accudemia account through their devices. Finally, you’ll determine who is the audience for your survey. Students are usually the target audience of the surveys feature, but Accudemia can prompt tutors or instructors to fill them out as well.
In addition to the general options, there are also some advanced settings you may want to utilize when setting up your survey. For example, you can specify when the survey should start and stop, and set the system to force the student to take the survey after a certain amount of time has passed before they can do anything else in Accudemia. You can also indicate if students should be notified via email when they have a survey to complete.
After configuring your options and settings, you’re ready to build the questionnaire. Questions can be multiple choice or open text, and you can ask as many as you’d like.
Cloning a Survey
If you have built a survey in the past that will be the basis of your next one, then cloning a survey is a good option. From the main surveys page, you can clone a survey by clicking the leftmost Clone button on the far right of each survey listed.
Make sure you rename the survey after cloning it; this ensures you can distinguish it from the existing survey. Make any changes that you need to before you save it, and you’re good to go!
Previewing and Testing a Survey
Before deploying a survey to your students or other target users, we always recommend reviewing and testing if possible. You can preview a survey while you are editing it by clicking the preview button on the main Surveys screen. This will give you an idea of what the survey will look like once a target user sees it.
However, to ensure your survey will run properly, we highly recommend testing it as well. This should either be tested on a fake student, or a tutor who is also a student. When testing the survey, remember to recreate the triggering event, whether it’s signing in at a kiosk or accessing Accudemia through the internet. If there are any specific options the student must pick, such as a course or service, make sure your test student is picking those as well. You should also make sure to recreate the “Show at” environment, or where the survey displays to the student. This can be at sign-in or out at a kiosk, or when the student logs into Accudemia through the internet.
Testing is a vital part of your survey deployment process, and will ensure a smooth rollout and increase your chances of getting responses!
Starting, Stopping, or Deleting the Survey
Most surveys will not run indefinitely, and Accudemia makes it easy to start and stop a survey. From the main Survey page, you can easily see if a survey is running or not running, and change its status. A survey in Start mode is published and available for users to fill out if they meet the triggers. A survey in Stop mode is not running yet or has concluded its run. You also have the option to delete a survey but be cautious of this. Deleting a survey cannot be undone and will permanently remove not only the survey but any results that you have not already exported from Accudemia.
Accudemia Surveys are one of the most robust features in the system, and we hope this post has helped shed some light on how to use them to collect student feedback. Contact us with any questions, and we hope to see you at the next Accudemia Tech Talk!
Join us next time!
Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Tech Tip segment recap for the Accudemia session on 7/12/2022. Held Tuesdays at 1 pm EST (weekly during the academic year, and monthly during the summer), Accudemia clients can join a session to learn about a quick, useful topic from one of our Support Specialists. Each week, we’ll follow up Tech Tip Tuesday with a blog recapping that week’s topic. Check the page about our Monthly Accudemia Session to find out more about our next session and for more ideas about helping our students achieve success!
