Introducing a shiny new magical survey site

I have already waxed poetic about DTLT’s awesomeness. While I don’t want to bore you with a repeat, sometimes genius just has to be recognized. Plus, I can take maybe 10% of the credit here, which I will unabashedly do. (Ok, more like 5%)

Let me first set the stage: I teach the historic preservation capstone class, otherwise known as the “hell class”. What makes it so hard is the dizzying amount of data students have to collect from the field and organize into a cohesive whole. Making it much, much harder, students in the past had to depend on excel to get the work done. To make a long story short: the form couldn’t have prompts or limited fields => errors, info had to be copied into excel => more errors. Lots of time was wasted fixing mistakes, copying, and generally completing tasks that aren’t meaningful.

NOT ANYMORE!

Martha Burtis made me a shiny new umwblog site. It lets students upload the info right on their cell phones. So now they can go to the properties and just enter the data on site: no recopying. Plus, photos, sketches and maps are integrated.

This saves them (and me) a ton of time and effort. Now the form makes sure they don’t enter errors or leave fields blank. It also means all the students in my two sections can access the property info anywhere and from any platform without having to download 5 gigs of files.

My students just started working with the new survey system, so I’ll have more to say about this in the weeks to come, but I will end this post with a few thoughts:

1- yes, there will be tech problems with this approach. It’s unavoidable. But I still think any growing pains will be more than made up for by the better data quality and easier setup.
2- I’ll discuss later the next step: integration with further analysis in SPSS. This part is the one that should help me the most. *rubs hands in glee*
3- as usual, DTLT provided the magic to make it all happen. Martha Burtis wielded the magic wand this time around. I can’t emphasize how lucky I feel to be in an institution where I have the support to do stuff like this, and the people with the expertise and enthusiasm to do the heavy lifting.
4- any students reading this: 405 will still be challenging, so don’t take your foot off the gas. But at least now your efforts will go straight to producing better content rather than dumb formatting.