We’ve been fortunate to be able to hold the line on costs with our Qualtrics contracts over the past several years despite significant pressure to pay more. This year, our negotiations with Qualtrics have resulted in some additional features and changes desired by our research community, along with a modest increase in cost.
New Features:
Offline Mobile App
Some news about the features we’re gaining! First and most desired is that this new contract enables the Off-line Mobile App to be used in research. This means that you can borrow or use iPads out in the “wild” with folks to complete your survey data collection while not actively connected to the internet! Several faculty members have requested this feature, and we’re happy to be able to bring it to you!
Qualtrics API
Another significant improvement is that we now have access to the Qualtrics API, which will allow us to code better user management workflows into how we work with Qualtrics. Faculty interested in exploring how the API access can benefit their research should be in contact with the Academic Technology team.
Better Training
Third, the new contract comes with enhanced access to Qualtrics XM Basecamp on-demand learning portal to more quickly ramp up users through online courses designed to guide folks from foundational knowledge to confident independence in their use of these tools.
And More!
There are other feature enhancements that individuals might find attractive, and we’d be happy to share more information with folks who are interested. Please reach out and let us know how you’d like to take advantage of the Qualtrics online survey tool!
New Qualtrics Retention Policy coming
We have also agreed to become more active in managing the number of users who have active Qualtrics accounts at any point in time. What this means is that we need to finalize our retention policy for Qualtrics content when someone leaves the College. Our current thinking is that our policy should allow for a 1 year grace period on removing old student accounts in Qualtrics, post graduation. Since the login to the Qualtrics system is based on one’s College credentials, which expire when one departs the institution, that should not be a security issue. We think a year should enough time to allow for faculty to realize that projects were shared problematically, even if there is a sabbatical during that period. We expect similar time frames to apply for staff and faculty who leave the College.
NOTE: We are not doing anything to restrict or remove older surveys in the system, just to manage content created by folks who are no longer affiliated with the College!
Thinking About Collaboration
When faculty collaborate with students on surveys, and then the student graduates, there can be a loss of access. If the faculty member created the survey in the first place, this is not an issue, but if the student created the initial survey, the the student technically “owns” it in Qualtrics. If the faculty continue to use that share survey in their research, there may be issues if we are forced to delete that student’s work as part of our annual cleanup of old accounts. This leads me to two points.
How to Prepare
First, please be very aware of who owns the surveys you use in your research projects. If surveys are owned by your students, ask them to transfer the survey to you. If they leave before you can request that transfer, then please ask us. We can do the transfer for you.
Second, create surveys yourself, and then collaborate and share them with your students. Even if it’s an otherwise blank survey, you’ll still own it, and it won’t go away when the student graduates.
Please let us know if you’ve collaborated with a colleague who’s leaving the College for another institution. Qualtrics stores surveys on different servers and that can make ongoing collaborations challenging, but still resolvable with our assistance.
Non-academic departments that rely on Qualtrics surveys created by one of their members will also need to attend to the ownership of those surveys when employees or colleagues leave the College community. Please reach out to us for help support@swarthmore.edu or on our portal page: https://support.swarthmore.edu/