Lime Survey

I have started an initiative to create a departmentally sponsored, in-house alternative to SurveyMonkey. It will run on LimeSurvey. I announced the initiative two days ago and I already have seven people working with me.

There is a front page for the initiative - I will add resources to it as the project develops. I am also starting a new category on this blog to archive some of the key posts about the project. And here comes the first post - this time about label sets

To make learning LS easier for you, I have imported some survey building blocks - label sets. Label sets are answer option templates that can be shared between different surveys. For example, if you create a label set for a 7 point Likert scale from "Strongly agree" to "strongly disagree", the set is there for you and everyone else to use in subsequent surveys. More information on label sets here

I have imported a dozen common label sets to give you an idea what they are like and give you something to work with. Glenn has also imported a few that Michel Haigh has used in her study at PSU. See the link above on how to use / import / modify label sets.

If you want to keep up with this initiative, there are several things you can do:
- bookmark the "Lime Survey" category on this blog
- subscribe to our listserv (you will have to contact me for that - otherwise we will drown in spam)
- visit the initiative homepage

At the dawn of the Internet age (feels good to start a blog entry with two cliches) there was talk about accessibility, equality, and emancipation - the new technology would do what the old technology hasn't done, i.e. provide accessible, inexpensive education to the masses.

Predictably, that didn't happen - at least not everywhere. In many cases, computer technology has made it easier to make money on education. Here at the University of Oklahoma one can see how things have evolved from free or unneeded to costly and indispensable.

The university website runs (at least partially) on a proprietary (=expensive) ASP standard from Microsoft; e-mail services are driven by Exchange; course management is done through Desire To Learn; students and faculty are given access to "free" software through the IT store to do things like word processing and spreadsheets (Microsoft Office) or to manage citations (EndNote). These packages are not free because the university still has to pay a wholesale price to the software developers and then pay for it over time - most likely through student fees.

It is not just students that are forced to use commercial IT products; faculty often have to do the same for research software. And here one of everyone's favorites is SurveyMonkey. This is a commercial solution for running online surveys. It costs $20 a month (there is a free subscription option, but it won't do much - it is rather like free mustard and ketchup when you actually want a burger). I know several faculty who are happily paying that for their subscriptions and are very pleased with the service.

SurveyMonkey is a good product - provided you can afford to pay for it. For many universities in this world, $200 a year is a significant expense. It can only seem insignificant when lost in the quagmire of multibillion university budges or buried in the depths of seven-digit grant applications.

So what do you do if you can't afford it? The ticket is to look for open source solutions. Just like you can replace ASP with PHP, Desire To Learn with Moodle, and EndNote with Wikindx, you no longer need SurveyMonkey if you can install and run LimeSurvey.

Just like Moodle, Wikindx and Serendipity (the blog package running this blog), LimeSurvey is an open source community project running on PHP and MySQL. It took me one hour to install and configure it on my server. It would have taken 15 minutes, but I just had to give it MySQL 4 connection details instead of MySQL 5 and wonder why it didn't work.

I am happy to report that with the arrival of LimeSurvey (a big thank you to Glenn Hansen for showing it to me) there is no longer any need for commercial services to do online surveys. I keep collecting open source server-side software for doing things for free in the academic world - and LimeSurvey is definitely one of the jewels in the collection. So far I have:

- Moodle - course management
- Serendipity - blogs / CMS (one possible solution out of many available)
- Wikindx - bibliography management and sharing
- LimeSurvey - online surveys
- AntConc - concordancer (this is a client-side app, but a great one nonetheless)

The best things in life are free.