Surveys with Google
It was fun to go through the videos at Atomic learning and watch Dr. Via’s videos to see how to create a survey using Google docs. The instruction was deceptively easy, because once I began my own survey, I soon discovered how easy it was to stumble, particularly when incorporating branching logic.
Background. Our Applied Business program at UAF’s Community and Technical College provides office skills courses in the classroom. Because of lower enrollments in the classes, they are stacked and meet once a week for three hours. The courses include keyboarding, skillbuilding, document formatting, intermediate keyboarding, alphabetic filing, 10-key calculators, office procedures, and records management. The syllabi have been fashioned so that students have a schedule of learning activities and testing, but the schedule is flexible as long as the work is completed by the end of the semester. Class meeting times are spent working one on one or in small groups with the instructor. Enrollments in the courses have been declining, and our department hopes that enrollment may rise if we offered the classes through elearning, thus reaching a wider audience.
With that in mind, I created my survey regarding the office skills classes. My survey is located at https://goo.gl/forms/iOipqaPOSC0shypk1 My classmates and instructor have completed the survey and provided feedback.
Although the current feedback isn’t terribly meaningful, it was useful to make sure the survey would work and also interesting to see the resulting graphs. I am well versed in creating graphs and charts in Excel, but wasn’t sure how to convert the graphical results in Google to my own sheets.
Analyzing Results. Although my respondents were few, the extent of the graphical results in Google Forms was impressive. Less impressive was my ability to share those results. Because I could not discover a share link for the form results, I began to recreate the charts in the googlesheets form results. I quickly found that when mulitple criteria were involved, I would need to restate the data with all options and include a COUNTIF formula. Instead, I did a quick workaround capturing the image of those charts and placing the image in the googlesheet. All of the charts are on separate sheets, but I could also have put them in one long scrolling sheet like the original results. My googlesheet of results is here (note that there are 12 sheets in the workbook):
I feel this post would be more graphically interesting if I had included screenshots like my classmate, Nikki Stein. Instead, I opted to work in googlesheets. Upon reflection, I think her method was better for sharing results.
