My Experience Using Online Surveys by Zoomerang

What do our parents think about IST? How about the students? What are their thoughts about the way they learn and how they are assessed? Do we live up to our school philosophy? Do they like the lunch? As part of our CIS/WASC accreditation process, we want to know the answers to these questions and more. So we created two online surveys for our school community–one for parents and one for students. We opened and closed our parent survey in December a few days before the winter break. We opened the student survey to our DP students yesterday. We’ll ask the MYP students to take the survey by the end of this week.

To build our surveys we purchases a pro subscription with Zoomerang. After building the surveys some weeks ago and organizing some of the results just yesterday, I have some thoughts about my first experience with online surveys in general and Zoomerang’s online survey tool.

Works for Me
It’s easy to build a complex survey with Zoomerang. You get an intuitive workspace with useful features. The duplicate feature, for example, trimmed a couple of hours off the total time (about four hours) it took me to build the first survey. It allowed me to duplicate a question with all of its formatting and paste it into the survey. I would then just need to revise the question. A great time saver! Otherwise, I would have to write the question and then format the response type over and over again (button, multiple answer, rating, open-ended, etc.). To check the look and functions, Zoomerang gives you an easy to use preview button for your survey.

There is a feature that allows us to direct people to certain questions based on their answers. If a parent indicates she only has children in the MYP program, then she is only given the MYP specific questions. Likewise, parents with DP students only see the DP questions. Creating this skip logic was kind of tricky because I had to consider three sets of questions (PYP, MYP, and DP) but once I got my head around the idea it was easy to do with Zoomerang’s Add a Skip feature at the bottom of each page.

A few other useful features… Zoomerang gives a wide selection of question types to choose from. However, we wanted more flexibility with the Comments feature. I’ll discuss that below. We could build customized intro and thank you pages easily. And once I had one survey created, I could use it as a template to create another one. I created the student survey this way by copying the parent survey. I still had to go in and revise the questions and skip logic, but this saved me the effort and time of setting up the all of the question and response formats. Another great time saver! For questions that are not open-ended, we can generate customized color charts and then download them or load them into a presentation. We haven’t used that feature yet, but it looks like a handy one for sharing the results.

Not So Good
We felt limited when building our question types. We wanted to provide a text box for additional comments into nearly every response. However, the only way I found to do this was by using a rating scale – matrix type question. It wasn’t our preferred question type but we found a way to make it work for us. You can see an example in the image above. I don’t like the look and feel of that layout. That line disrupts the flow and the buttons with numbers are repetitive. I would rank this low in readability but it got the job done.

Analyzing results did not turn out to be as easy as we had anticipated. We wanted to extrapolate and print individual responses but found no easy way to do this. It has to be done individually and each print job requires seven clicks. It’s a tedious and time consuming job. I was hoping for one button that would print out individual responses. There is a button that prints out an overview. That’s useful but we need more buttons like that which allow us to extrapolate specified data to print. As it is, we can get it done but it takes too much manual labor to be considered an efficient process.

Would I use Zoomerang again? Maybe. I’m pretty new at this and still I found the surveys easy to build. I didn’t use them but tutorials are readily available to learn more. When it comes time for another survey, I’m sure that I will look around for online surveys that allow for a wider use of a text box for additional comments and more granular control when it comes time to analyze survey results.