The entire university last week gained access to Qualtrics, an online tool that simplifies and streamlines the creation of surveys and that will save money compared to previous services.
The acquisition allows all faculty, staff and undergraduate and graduate students of the university to use the product via tufts.qualtrics.com under a one-year contract, according to Assistant Director for University Information Technology (UIT) Contract and Licensing Services Debbie Nanni.
Faculty and staff received an email last Tuesday announcing access to the program. As of Friday afternoon, 137 people had logged on to the site and 69 surveys had been created, according to UIT Director of Communications and Organizational Effectiveness Dawn Irish.
The acquisition was intended to improve cost effectiveness across the university.
"All the departments are distributed so you don't really know who's paying from what," Irish said.
The Tufts community can log on to Qualtrics with their Universal Tufts Login Name (UTLN) and password without having to create a new account, Irish said.
Nanni said the purchase should save the university several thousand dollars, and Irish added that UIT had often received requests for such a survey program in the past.
According to Nanni, the reactions to Qualtrics thus far have been positive.
"They feel it's got great functionality [and that] it's intuitive to use," she said.
UIT often makes purchases that are only available for use by staff, but Qualtrics is available to students.
"Most of our vendors do not extend their licensing to students," Nanni said. "They do separate agreements with students, but in this case the vendor was offering this as a bundle, and we are thrilled when we can make things like this available to students."
Qualtrics has sold close to 160 university-wide licenses, Kevin Todd, of the Academic Sales department at Qualtrics, told the Daily.
Nanni said that UIT began discussing purchasing a university-wide license in October of last year.
Available funds in the UIT budget facilitated the purchase.
"Occasionally, we save money on a project, and we're able to leverage a vendor and get a discount, so we have a little money left over," Irish said. "There's times when we can piece things together and do something that's wasn't expected, and this was one of those things."
Students were first introduced to Qualtrics this December, when 1,577 undergraduate and graduate students responded to the annual Dining Services survey, according to Tufts Nutrition Marketing Specialist Julie Lampie. The survey was conducted by the Office of Institutional Research using Qualtrics software, according to Research Analyst Lauren Conoscenti.
Although Qualtrics is available to the entire university through UIT, Dining Services will continue to hire the Office of Institutional Research and Evaluation to produce and analyze its annual student surveys.
"There is an art in terms of how you ask questions," Lampie said. "Just because it's available online to create your own survey instrument doesn't mean you have the expertise to write the best format; you have to ask in a certain way in terms of objectivity."
Associate Professor of Psychology Heather Urry uses Survey Monkey, an alternative online survey tool, for her Experimental Psychology course. Urry said that she currently pays more than 20 dollars per month from the department budget and 360 dollars from her research funds annually for the service. She believes that Qualtrics will not only save her money, but also has features that Survey Monkey does not offer.
"One of the things that Survey Monkey has not been able to do traditionally is to send us an email when somebody has completed a response," she said. "In my line of work, we might be asking someone about sensitive information having to do with whether they're having suicidal thoughts. We want to know when someone completes a survey so we can very quickly go in and see [if] we need to take any action here."
The new tool may also benefit student groups.
"From the perspective of someone in charge of a club, it's a really good investment because it allows for more uniformity," Co-President of the Tufts Sustainability Collective Katie Segal, a sophomore, said. "Students might not be as intimidated; Survey Monkey is kind of random."
