Like many colleges and universities, every semester we conduct a survey of both our instructors and our students regarding their experience with Blackboard.  The purpose of the survey is to get a pulse on what is happening with the system and to help determine where we need to improve and enhance the system to better meet the needs of our stakeholders with the goal of improving student success.

The big idea with end user surveys is to help ensure (by measurement) that Blackboard is meeting the needs of our faculty and students, and to discover any potential problems that may be occurring. 

As with any survey, some of the most important data is only extracted through open ended comments, rather than simplified answers to multiple choice or questions based on a Likert scale.  Not that it isn't important to ask questions that are objective based, but perhaps even more important are those circumstances where you would like to ask for perspectives or to gather ideas that are not easily obtained without using an open ended question format.

The trouble is... how do you quickly evaluate these responses?  Well there isn't really a way to truly review open ended responses to surveys without reading them, word-for-word.  This is important, but what if you just want a quick pulse or read on some general keywords?  Enter the tag cloud.  As tag clouds have gained in popularity from blogs to wikis to social bookmarking applications like Blackboard Scholar, so too have the tools that enable them to be created. 

While there are many tag cloud generators on the web, one of the easiest I've found to use is called Wordle.net.  It's as easy as copying text and pasting it in... and clicking the Go button.  Without getting to wordy on this Best Practice post... and before turning this post into a tag cloud itself :) , one of the ways I have found to quickly scan open ended comments in a survey is to create a tag cloud of the responses with Wordle.  For example, when we asked our students about why they believe that using Blackboard is beneficial to them, we received more than 350 responses... and while again, reading them is important, by placing their responses into Wordle, the following graphic revealed some important themes, such as grades, class, better, access, time,online,available,assignments, information. [See Image Below]

Equipped with these themes and the rest of the survey data, I've been able to promote features and functionality that make a difference to students in their learning.  This in turn, has also proved helpful in marketing the benefits of using Blackboard to those faculty that haven't yet adopted using it in their teaching.

What are your thoughts, how have you taken survey information and used it to help increase awareness and adoption at your institution?