A warm welcome to 2004 from the JISCmail team. You will notice that this issue has myself as joint editor. Philippa is taking a break as editor and is now on maternity leave awaiting the birth of her child. Our main feature for this issue is ‘Surveys ’ we are really excited about bringing this new functionality to the JISCmail service. We believe it will become a popular function and provide you with a lot of opportunities to seek feedback in all aspects of your work. During the coming months we will also bring to your list(s) a  ‘Discussion forum’. More on this in Issue 6.

Penny Windebank / Philippa Strange, Editor

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JISCmail 2004

Quick Tour of Surveys

 

To become really familiar with this facility, we suggest you view the web pages, read through the online help and then perhaps try a small survey out on your members to fully appreciate the value it may bring to your needs for communication and collaboration. But to help you get started, we have prepared a few notes to guide you through the main features.

 

Firstly, as a list member, you will see that your list’s main page now has an extra link below the files area link, called, not surprisingly, “Surveys”. Following this link takes you to the screen below.

 

Fig. 1

 

In Fig. 1, you can see that surveys fall into one of two categories, active and concluded. An active survey will be available in the active surveys drop down menu and each available survey will have a name with a date in brackets alongside. This date is the one chosen by the list owner as the final date by which responses to their survey will be accepted. After this date our system automatically concludes the survey and no further responses are possible. To respond to an active survey, please select it in the drop down and press the “Fill-out Survey” button. You will be presented with the entire survey and you can then respond to each question as you wish. Please note that as a member, you can only respond to each survey just the once.

      

How do my colleagues feel about recent changes in policy or organisation? What were the really valuable experiences from my last meeting or conference? Is my policy on advertising jobs or events and my way of dealing with off-topic postings in line with my members’ wishes?

 

Whatever you want to ask your list members, you now can, with our new JISCmail Surveys facility, which provides list owners with a quick and easy way to conduct online web-based surveys on their lists.

 

Our new Surveys facility has a number of benefits for owners and members :-

 

·   Its free – there are no costs, no limits on the number of surveys, numbers of questions or the frequency with which you run them.

 

·   Its responsive – you can define your questions and make then available to your members at once. Being online, as members you can answer easily and at a time that suits you and you can be sure that your answers are completely anonymous.

 

·   Its flexible – you can make the survey as short or as detailed as you like. You can keep it simple with questions requiring just yes/no answers or there are a number of other options, such as multiple choice radio buttons, drop down lists, and also open questions where list members can express their opinions in their own words. Surveys can be short and performed once or they can be detailed questionnaires for research or consultancy that can be run repeatedly to monitor changing opinions over time.

 

·   Its powerful – results can be monitored online as they are received, displayed online as bar graphs or downloaded for further processing and presentation in a spreadsheet or other software packages.

 

·   Its simple to use – its easy to design the survey, to answer the questions and to view the results and because its part of JISCmail all communications such as introductions, explanations and discussions of results can be performed alongside on your list.

JISCmail Surveys by Les Cesek  

 

Issue 5

 

Feb/March 2004

Newsletter

Inside this issue:

JISCmail Surveys

JISC Conference 2004

 

Newcomers Corner: Passwords

Favourites

 

Tips for List Owners:

Topics

Bulk Add

 

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