The focus during this time has been producing the questionnaire in readiness for publishing to all new first year students this week together with the flyer advertising this.
The survey started out with over 100 questions - far too long - no one would complete that!!!! And yet every question was relevant and would give an insight into how students felt about being at Goldsmiths.
After deliberation this was summarised down to a workable 79 questions and was broken down into 5 categories:
About you - to identify what type of students they are (post graduate, international, widening participation) in order to progress forward with a defined set of cohorts in future questionnaires
Pre-arrival - to gauge perception of their experience to date
Arrival - to establish their first impressions - do they feel welcome, do they have any issues, do they know who to go to to address these
Funding - get their viewpoint on how they have found this
Follow- up - a major part of this initial survey will be to identify a group of willing cohorts who are prepared to assist with the project going forward and who will give us quality information to analyse
After much refining, which was all noted and tracked in a spreadsheet so we could see how things were evolving, the survey was ready for testing and timing. This was a concern as we didn't want students to be put off by this. However, by putting this on the front introduction page and incorporating a progress bar then students were fully aware of how much commitment was required of them from the offset.
Then to the flyer for handing out at enrollment. The concern was about putting too much information on this and having them miss the point of what we were asking them to do. However, we kept the front simple yet aesthetically pleasing and on the back obtained a load of useful contacts hence they would be less likely to throw this away. Additionally, by doing this we were able to split the costs with another department thus keeping an eye on the budget and costs down. The outcome was a high gloss, A5 flyer that looks pretty darn good.
The front: 
and the back:
Of course now all this has been done it's out of our hands and is down to the students as to whether or not they complete it. Nightmares have been had about it, risks have been discussed - was it still too long, would they find it boring, would they just curse and abandon it.......
Well 4 days since its launch I am happy to report that as of 5 minutes ago we are up to:
101 surveys started
80 completed (79.2%) - obviously some students have just logged on
70 people agreeing to help with further work
An example of some of the information we will extract from this can be seen in the following chart:
The survey closes on Friday 2nd October but I am sure you will agree that we have a healthy start to our information gathering.
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