PE4_SurveyGizmo

Using Survey Gizmo 3.0 to improve ranking input from fellow faculty members.

In our 12 month film program, the course they take in the 7th month is Film Production Two, for which I am the course director. It is commonly know as "midterms" and is essentially a practicum in which they put the skills they have learned in their sequence of core film making classes that occupy the first 6 months into practice. It requires that I organize 12-70 students into crews to build, prep and shoot from 5 to 20 separate productions. They each serve on 5 crews on sets they build on our stages over the course of 4 weeks. We go from design to shoot in 4 days, requiring that they work 5-6 days a week for 10 -12 hours a day, doing everything from carpentry to costume making and then of course all the various on-set jobs. It is a crazy whirlwind in which they report that they they learn much more than in any of their other courses.

Part of the point of the course structure is to expose them to a simulation of realistic film production environment, where 14 hour workdays are common, if not standard. But to work such long hours requiring collaboration in in so many different skill areas, can be very taxing on them, and the failures or conflicts among a just a few can end up severely damaging the quality of the final product: their finished films. Since they take pride in these films and since screenings of them are the way we assess their progress (just as they assess each other's abilities), failures in collaboration can severely diminish their educational opportunities.

But since I have not yet met any of the students before they come to P2, I must rely on the evaluations of the teachers that precede me to give the the data I need to form appropriately heterogeneous and harmonious groupings.

So here are my efforts at using Google forms. I made a number of test forms to see how useful the results would be. This test form uses place holder names and categories to review how they are reported in the associated spreadsheets.

 But the data output here is not going to work as Google form will not allow me to set up the questions in ways that I get the right data formatted correctly.

But for my purposes I would like the data to be easily imported into my stage schedule and student preference worksheets as well as the new ranking data worksheet.

So I am going to use survey Gizmo. It seems to have has the most comprehensive formatting and export options of any of the free survey makers I have tried (Survey Monkey, Zoomerang) which have some serious limitations  in free mode.

First are the theme selections which are varied and attractive. I want something plain and simple to share with my colleagues and students.

Then adding questions and selecting the question type, and entering the various fields depending of that type. This is one of the pluses I find in Survey Gizmo, as I have many more complex choices than some of the others.

For this survey I need some fairly complex questions.

Here I am asking each instructor who receives the survey to grade each students' skill in each film department. This is using a table of drop down menus with the students as rows, the departments as columns and the grades as the drop down selection.
A result I will conflate with the student preferences from their surveys to assure that I have students with adequate competency in each department on each shoot.

I hate the way "--Please Select--" is repeated across this whole table. It is obvious and ugly. I have put in a help request ticket to see if i can find a way to edit this prompt.

To fine tune the survey, I have it generate test data, asking for 10 responses using the generate text data link.

  Then do an export of the data to a CSV excel file.

And then analyze the output to assure that it is useful and formatted properly. Here I have dicovered a few problems in this iteration of the process.

I edited my questions from a previous editing iteration where they were an A+ to F, 12 value table, to only a 5 value A-F, after I looked at the preview and found it that it looked a bit overwhelming. So I deleted the + and - columns, but left the reporting values for each entry the same, so that I get odd returns of 0, 2, 5, 8, and 11.

I also realized that I had not set reporting values at all for the department grades, so that they returned the raw letter grades, which will require a more complex "if" formula for excel to be able to aggregate, so I am going to go back and re-edit the survey to resolve these issues.

I edited this question so that the ranks were in number values in keeping with the other scores and the GPA data I get, and added an explanation, somewhat self evident, of what the numbers mean.
Now I will retest the survey myself and when i feel it is working as I want,  email it to the various instructors.

As the returns come in, I can will copy the appropriate data from the export excel worksheet into my own preference worksheets and run my formulas and sorts to get the output that I can use to form the groups.

I have not had a lot of luck getting cooperation from my fellow instructors in the past. I have over the past ouple of years been able to finally win over our program director by sharing research i have collected on the importance of heterogeneity in cooperative learning groups, and he stated that he will intercede on my behalf to get me ranking data. But, none has yet been forthcoming. I am hoping that using an online survey tool will I make delivering this data to me much easier for the other faculty. In this vein i also edited the survey so that it now has only two questions.

Their main objection has always been they think it better to just "keep it simple" pointing out that they form their groups in various simple ways that work fine. But in the P2 course, which requires so much more work, in so many  diverse areas, I had found empirically that more simple solutions were causing serious problems.

Here is the link of my published survey http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/642878/Nov-11-P2-Student-Ranking
I have distributed to 6 faculty members and the program director. I will report back once I start getting responses.