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Creating an Account To create a new Flashlight Online account, send your name, e-mail, and department affiliation to: OCS@vt.edu. A user name and password will be e-mailed back to you (most likely your Virginia Tech PID twice, e.g., jdoe, jdoe). Enter your user name and password to log into the Flashlight Online system at the following URL: http://ctlsilhouette.ctlt.wsu.edu/ctlsilhouette2_5/. User names and passwords are case sensitive, so enter them exactly as e-mailed to you. |
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Planning a Survey IMPORTANT: The Flashlight Current Student Inventory contains over 500 items, organized into 14 sub-scales. Before attempting to start a new survey, it is highly recommended that you spend some time outlining the goals of your evaluation. What classroom activities do you want to know more about? Interaction? Engagement? Perhaps you would like to know if your approach to technology training was sufficient. Perhaps the questions you need to ask are not included in a Flashlight Online sub-scale. In short, it will be difficult to develop a quality survey by simply pulling pre-defined items out of the Flashlight sub-scales. Know what you are looking for before you start to use Flashlight Online. Consultation is available through Educational Technologies to help plan your survey. It should also be noted that surveys are only one data collection method available. Flashlight Online items can be used in surveys as well as interviews and focus groups. A quality evaluation will likely utilize multiple methods (e.g., interviews, observations with rubrics, artifact analysis). A survey may be a good starting point, providing indicators of technology use in a course. Follow-up methods could then serve to clarify the presence or absence of trends suggested by the survey. |
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Starting Individual or Group Surveys When ready to start a new survey, click on the "new survey" button. You will be presented with a "survey properties" screen. Fill-in a title for your survey. Next, click ONLY ONE OPTION between one and four: author only makes your survey readable and editable by only you, author and group makes your survey readable and editable by everyone in your departmental group (sub-groups can be assigned upon request), group makes your survey readable but not editable by your departmental group, and world read makes your survey readable but not editable by any institution using Flashlight Online. Finally, decide if you want to password-protect your survey. If you wish to password protect your survey, you will need to assign a respondent ID and password for every individual to take the survey, then distribute these to your students. You will then be able to track who has taken the survey and their individual responses. This type of tracking may require approval of the human subjects review board at Virginia Tech, or at least, signed student permission to track responses. If your survey is more formative in nature to help you improve the use of technology in your classes, you need not assign respondent IDs. |
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Sample Surveys The surveys below were derived from pre-defined Flashlight Online items and are provided to demonstrate how surveys are administered online. Each sample survey is specific and focused on one issue, but in actuality, a survey would likely contain items focusing on multiple issues. Survey
of Student Usage of Course Info Communication Tools Survey
of Faculty-Student Interaction in a Technology-Supported Course Survey
of Active Learning in a Technology-Supported Course |
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Frequently Asked Questions Who
can read my survey? Who
maintains my survey data? Do
I have to use only the pre-defined items in Flashlight, or can I write
my own items? How
do students access my survey? Will
the survey data be backed up? How
long will my account last? How
long will this service last? Why
won't my user name and password work? |
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