Hey Noles! Before we get to the main content of this blog post, I just want to remind you all that the course catalog for next semester will open on March 8th, 2021! This will give you a chance to review which courses are being offered for the upcoming semesters and plan your schedule before actual enrollment opens. If you need advice, we have some articles on the Undergraduate Degree Progress, which can be used to easily track what you have left to accomplish in your degree, and another on using the EvaluationKIT to read feedback about classes from previous semesters. Links to both posts can be found below:
Undergraduate Degree Progress: https://fsutransfers.wordpress.com/2020/12/04/fsu-undergraduate-degree-progress/
EvaluationKIT: https://fsutransfers.wordpress.com/2020/10/30/using-evaluationkit-on-canvas-to-research-courses-and-professors/
Have you ever needed to create a survey for a class, or maybe you need to gather peer feedback on a professional platform? In this post, I would like to focus on a resource known as Qualtrics, which is an amazing survey making platform that is available free to FSU students. As a transfer student, I had previously used Google Forms during my time at community college, though since transferring to FSU, I have preferred Qualtrics as it is much more detailed with what you are capable of. I am going to give a more generalized introduction, but at the end of this post I will link some more in-depth resources for you to continue learning Qualtrics.
To get started, please visit:
You will need to get started by logging in with your usual FSU ID and password. When you are ready to begin creating a new survey, hit “Create new project” in the top-right corner of your browser window.
You will be presented with a large range of survey templates, but for the sake of this tutorial, I am just going to select the default survey template.
By default, Qualtrics will have your questions set to multiple choice. If you click on a particular question, once it is highlighted blue, you will see a new option appear to your left to change the question type. Another thing worth noting on this page is the iQ Score, which you can click on to get a more detailed summary of your ranking. The iQ Score is helpful for determining the accessibility of your survey – the lower the score, the more trouble certain parties may have completing the survey as intended.
Question types are where Qualtrics really excels for me over competitors like Google Forms. One of my favorite types of questions to implement are heat maps, which allow users to click on an image, and then you can see where the majority of users clicked via a thermal style view.
Back on the top Qualtrics ribbon, we can see a few more options. Look & Feel is good for changing the visual presentation for your survey. By default, however, FSU Qualtrics surveys already have FSU theming built in, which works fine for me and therefore I tend to leave this setting as-is.
Click on Survey Options to change things like the survey language, security, and inactivity settings. Survey protection is another area that I think Qualtrics exceeds in; if you are performing research, you will want to pay close attention to this section, as it will ensure the survey results are as accurate as possible and free from outside interference. In the Survey Options menu, another feature I frequently use is the “Impartial Surveys” deletion. Essentially, if someone comes on and only fills out half of your survey, you can select how long that survey is kept around before being discarded. After all, you are probably only going to want to collect data from the people who have made it all the way to the end of the form.
Finally, it is time to view our survey results. Because the test survey I was using earlier did not have any responses, I will be shifting over to a class project from a previous semester for demonstration purposes. After a few people have responded, click on the “Reports” tab to see the results of your survey. Your responses should automatically be placed in a bar graph or another easy-to-interpret format. On the top ribbon, you can choose to share your results to external platforms.
I hope you have found this brief intro to Qualtrics helpful! Again, this was only a small sample of what Qualtrics is capable of, so I encourage you to keep learning using the link below. Qualtrics allows even complete beginners to make some amazing looking surveys! As always, thank you all for reading! GO NOLES!
For more details and further support on Qualtrics, please visit the site below for an overview by FSU ITS:
Author: Westen Dorweiler
FSU Transfers Helping Transfers 