Peer evaluations are done twice each term. As a project coach, you should encourage each team member to make a careful and candidate evaluation of his or her own performance and that of the other team members. This is an important element in your evaluation of the performance of each team member. You will setup a Qualtrics survey project for each team that you coach. Once you create the survey project for the first peer evaluation for a team, you should be able to copy it and reuse it for the remaining three.
Creating a Qualtrics project
Here are the steps that you need to follow to create the Qualtrics project.
In your browser, go to survey.rit.edu and click on Login to Qualtrics. The first time that you do this, you will have to create a Qualtrics account.
Looking at a folder of Qualtrics projects, click on Create Project in the upper right corner of the window.
Click on Create From Existing. Select the From a File tab. Click on Choose a .QSF File.
Open the .qsf file that defines the survey. You can use this .qsf file to create the project. A PDF of the base survey is here.
Click Create Project in the lower right corner of the dialog box.
A new survey project should be created using the .qsf filename as the project name.
Editing the survey for your project team
Now you have to edit the placeholders for the individual team members to have the names of the actual students.
Click on the project to open the survey for editing.
You can edit questions by clicking in the question area then typically clicking the text you want to edit.
In the first descriptive text, put the project title and sponsor.
Each of the following questions has a list of all the students on the team. You can click on each Student n entry to edit it. An easier approach is to click in the area of the Who are You? question. In the options box that opens on the right, click Edit Multiple under Choices. This opens a dialog with all the entries present. Edit all of these entries to be the names of the students on your team. Before clicking Done, copy this list of students to the clipboard.
For each of the remaining questions, use Edit Multiple to paste the list of students from the clipboard to replace the placeholder list of students. Finish each edit by clicking Done.
This set of questions has worked well over several terms. You can adjust these to fit your own style. The two text input questions often provide a lot of information. The next to the last question alerts students that you might provide these comments to the team member being reviewed. The last question provides a place for students to provide confidential comments just to you. This often provide more candid comments that you then have to assess against the comments in the previous question. You should decide what approach you want to use for providing feedback, and adjust the questions accordingly. Also, let the students know the approach that you will take.
Distributing the survey so that students can take it
When you have finished editing the survey, you will need to publish it. You can select the green Publish button on the righthand side toward the top of the survey and receive an anonymous link that you will distribute to the students to complete the peer evaluation. You can also select the Distributions tab toward the left side in the menu bar near the top of the page and then click Get a single reusable link to get the anonymous link. Any time that you do something to the survey later, you will need to publish it but the anonymous link does not change.
If you need to get the anonymous link later, select the Distributions tab, and then Anonymous Link to recover the link.
If you want to set a due date after which the survey closes, select Surveyfrom the menu bar, and then Survey Options from the second level navigation bar. In the middle of the Survey Options dialog box, select Survey Expiration and adjust the valid date range as appropriate.
Looking at the responses
You can look at the responses from the Data & Anlaysis or Reports navigation item.
Data & Analysis tab - this displays the responses in a spreadsheet like interface. The easiest way to look at a single response is to select View Response in the dropdown menu at the right of each response. If you want to look at the data in the spreadsheet view, you may need to make all the columns visible. In the Tools dropdown on the right just above the data display, select Choose Columns. This allows you to view or hide any columns. You can also adjust their column position in the display. Note: it often takes Qualtrics a long time to build the view of your data when there are more than a few responses in your data set. It sometimes helps to leave the Data & Analysis page and return to it. Sometimes the Qualtrics tool seems to just get stuck.
If you would like to look at the data outside of the Qualtrics tool, you can download a CSV file by selecting Export Data from the Export & Import dropdown menu.
Reports tab - this provides better formatted displays of the response data that can aggregate data from multiple responses. There are default reports which are sometimes useful, and you can define your own reports. Currently, there are no custom reports defined in the survey template files.
Creating the other surveys later in the project
Once you have created the survey and adjusted it to your liking, you have two options for the later surveys:
Use the same project by deleting all of the previous responses. Go to Data & Analysis. Under the Tools dropdown, select Delete Data... and All Responses.
Copy the first project to create the new ones. View the project from the projects screen by clicking the Projects menu. Select Copy Project from the dropdown menu on the right side of the line the project is listed on.
