Survey Monkey

For this assignment, I created a survey using Survey Monkey and can be found at:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/53NMBSF

I created a survey because, not teaching credit courses, this is typically the type of assessment information that I need. I selected Survey Monkey because this is a product that is used by the Research Department at the college, and I wanted a better understanding of the tool and the types of questions that can be asked.

There are three account options:

• Basic account - Free account that allows one to create 10 question surveys
• Pro account - for $19.95/mo all the same features as the Basic account, plus a limitless number of questions per survey, skip-logic, expert templates, and the ability to download results to Excel and PDF
• Unlimited plan - for an additional $16.67/mo, the plan includes all the Basic and Pro account features with unlimited questions and unlimited responses

The learning curve to use this product to create a very simple survey is fairly short. Like most web-based products, Survey Monkey provides a tour of the product from its home page; however, this tour does not contain the kind of tutorial that a product like Jing, for example, had.  It is easy to select a question type and try it to see how it works and whether or not it will produce the type of question that one wants. However, it appears that to do anything a little more complex requires an upgrade to the "pro" version of the product. Even certain features of accessible question types are available only if one has the pro version.  This was somewhat frustrating, because even in the mini-survey that was created, it would have been nice to include branching logic.

The most difficult part of creating this assessment was not using the tool; but trying to create good questions that would result in meaningful information. With a career spent primarily in industries where quantitative data was collected and analysed, trying to find questions that would result in meaningful qualitative data is significantly more difficult.