A new year typically means new technology for the campus, and this fall is no exception. Starting immediately, students have access to a brand new way to make, manage and share surveys amongst themselves and their teachers.

For the last few years, ever since electronic surveys have been viable, Iowa State has been using various different methods for producing and conducting the method of data collection. Karla Embleton, instructional designer with the educational technology support staff, said the new system — called Qualtrics — will change the way campus does surveys.

Embleton works on surveys for the College of Human Sciences.

“Anybody who wants a survey for class or administration, I will code it for them,” she said. “I can give suggestions. Nobody was providing the web forms, so we stepped it up. Survey-making was mainly an add-on service, but nobody was fulfilling the need.”

Embleton stated that many groups and colleges on campus have licenses for different survey tools, an inconsistency that the Qualtrics deal aims to eliminate with its all-access availability for students and staff.

“This is the sixth year we’ve been using different software packages; we’re up to about 120 surveys a year,” Embleton said about the College of Human Sciences.

Embleton said a Qualtrics feature she’s excited about is its ability to let users work on collaborative surveys, much the same way a group can with Google documents.

In all of her years programming surveys for people who need them, Embleton has seen quite a few changes.

“You don’t really have to be a trained programmer any more,” Embleton said. “I have three degrees in engineering, but now you’re using software that makes it so simple. It’s much faster than hand-coding.”

Michael Lohrbach, senior systems analyst with Information Technology Services, is part of the group responsible for many services on campus like CyBox and Qualtrics.

Lohrbach and ITS first learned about Qualtrics from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He found that it was a service being heavily used by some of the colleges and groups, and with that, ITS determined it was their role to make it happen on a campuswide scale.

Now that Qualtrics is live at Iowa State, the people who introduced it also plan to use its services.

“I very much see us using it to help us determine what the demand for certain services are on campus,” Lohrbach said. “We are potentially replacing older methods of communication, and Qualtrics may meet those needs for us.”

Lohrbach hopes for it to be a common tool across campus.

“I can envision where students want to use a survey system without any fees to them,” he said. “It integrates with other campus systems like STSS, a stat analysis tool.”

The university acquired a three-year contract with Qualtrics, allowing students and staff with a NetID to use the service immediately. The service can be found and accessed at iastate.qualtrics.com 

“Additionally,” Lohrbach said, “the colleges will be able to get some nice reporting on whether their people are using the system successfully.”

The contract, which bills about $53,000 per year, is near to what the total cost was for the other colleges to use the service, Lohrbach said. The university was already spending about $30,000 to cover only subset parts of campus. Now, with a blanket contract in full effect, everyone has access to Qualtrics instead of a select few.