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Electronic Surveying: A Decision-Making Tool
Part One of this report explained the process related to the creation and transmission of an electronic survey instrument. This follow-up article explains the process of receiving and analyzing the returned surveys. Approximately 60 individuals (a 25 percent return) responded to the "distance learning" e-mail survey. Eighty-five percent had campus-level responsibilities for distance learning. Two individuals encountered problems returning the surveys because their e-mail systems would not process responses. With a survey group this small, the inability to return the survey by e-mail created no serious problem. However, were this software to be used for statewide decision-making, the campuses' e-mail systems would have to be checked for their processing ability. The demographic information compiled from the responses showed that approximately 50 percent of the respondents were from suburban Southern California campuses. Most respondents were from colleges with fewer than 300 hundred faculty members, and the total respondents were distributed almost equally from colleges with faculties under 100, from 101 to 200, and from 201 to 300. The project team also wanted a sense of participant’s future statewide virtual conferences conducted by the Connecting the Campuses project. (see Table 1). Almost unanimously, the respondents believed that the conferences should continue and that past conferences were adequate or outstanding. When asked about how the conferences should be utilized in the future, respondents saw the best continued purpose as the demonstrations and dissemination of information. Fewer than half saw virtual conferences as a decision-making model. To understand campus climates and related potential obstacles, the project team members asked respondents to describe their faculty and senior administrators as to how they think about technology. With multiple responses permitted, respondents depicted faculty as more likely to be both leaders and resistors of technology. Fewer respondents used the "resistor" categories to describe senior administrators. To plan future events, the Connecting the Campuses project team asked respondents to identify distance learning issues and time frames in which to address those issues. Given a list of choices to which multiple responses were possible, over two-thirds of the respondents saw "sharing of human/technology resources within the system" and "training staff in technology uses" as issues needing immediate attention with "training" continuing to be a top-ranked issue beyond a 3-year time frame. The "implementing of best practices on a larger scale" was the top-rated issue in the intermediate time frame. By testing the process, the project team saw the need to use a more powerful version of the survey software so that considerably more than 100 respondents could be tallied. As a side benefit, the project team saw the potential use of the e-mail survey's use in formative evaluations of projects funded by the Chancellor's Office, particularly with those projects that have identified a statewide impact. Overall, the project team understood how e-mail surveys could establish (1) statewide issues to be resolved, (2) time frames for those issues, and (3) methodology for narrowing the focus of the work to be accomplished during decisionmaking. |
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