Forum .LRN Q&A: Survey RFP and Spec posted.

The course evaluation applet mentioned in the RFP, which is planed for
November, is VERY interesting. The almost instant feedback that could be
collected could act as a catalyst for change on an organizational level. Being
able to collect data consistently would make it possible to react immediately to
problems that would otherwise slip through the cracks. It would also reduce
the costs associated with such data collection. Beautiful!

Suggestion: "Course Evaluation Administrators" should be able to be
assigned to specific departments, subjects or courses so the tool can be
applied to larger institutions, where individual departments (with there own
course evaluation administrators) could do evaluations independently of one
another.

To whomever it may concern 😊.

I have uploaded our version of the survey module which covers nearly 90% of the COMPLETE specs from sloan to the file-storage at https://openacs.org/new-file-storage/one-file.tcl?file_id=398.

This version was build on top of the survey module of ACES 2.0 and is still 3.5 based. But, as the survey module (survsimp) has been ported, you are pretty save in just taking our code, search for differences from ACES 2.0 and apply the changes accordingly. Should not take long (few DM additions, a couple of new procedures in the TCL library and I think 8 or 9 pages have been changed or added).

Things our version does not (in comparison to the complete specs):

• Alerts (due within middle of August for a client, which would include spaming survey users that they need to fill out a survey in x amount of days).
• We did not break the data down in segments....
• Individual data elimination (well, we have it but I was to lazy to zip it up as well).
• Editing of responses by other people (though we need to implement a system where the user can name persons to fill out the survey on his behalf)
• Hide user information
• Per survey templating
• Apparently no content repository 😊
• Data aggregation of the same survey on multiple groups (cool idea, will add this to our list for 3.5 😊).
• Improved reporting
• Survey import (this is going to be hard, I'd guess)
• Progress bars ?!? As in this is page 4 of 5 to be filled out to finish this survey ?

That's it pretty much, rest is included in the source. Hope you take our basis as we are not keen on porting our own version to have two functionally identical versions of survey sitting around. And if you want to do us a favour, include a service for uploading of answers to a section from a seperate program (as we have an interactive java program which could deliver answers [e.g. if you have to draw a curve as part of your exam, you could use this programm and it would store the result in your survey/exam using above mentioned service].

N-Joy the weekend

Sloan would like to thank everyone who responded to the Survey RFP. We got many great ideas and it was a difficult decision but we are pleased to announce that we have awarded the contract for survey section to Musea.

Musea will be delivering code with basic functionality to Sloan in 4 weeks.  Within the confines of this aggressive schedule they have told us they are committed to an open process with the community.  They are also committed to continuing to own this module within the open ACS framework.

Once again I want to thank everyone.  We received 7 bids and several other less formal expressions of interest. It was wonderful to see that  there were so many vendors/individuals to choose from as we have many more projects in the pipeline and continue to hear from other organizations interested in implementing dotLRN.