asset: Academic Survey System

1
asset Academic Survey System Evaluation Tool

• Bert G. Wachsmuth
• Seton Hall University

2
Overview

• Introducing asset
• Registered Users View
• How to create and maintain surveys
• Respondents View
• How to take a survey or a vote
• Researchers View
• How to obtain data for a survey
• Administrators View
• How to setup asset and maintain users
• Programmers View
• How does asset really work

3
Introducing asset

• asset Web-based survey tool
• Create, maintain, administer surveys and voting
  ballots
• View online data summary and export data
• Why ?
• Completely easy to use
• Not tied to existing entities (e.g. Blackboard
  courses)
• Flexible authentication (institutional and
  outside subjects and researchers, even in mixed
  groups)
• Voting capability
• Data stored locallyThere was asset version 1,
  based on shared surveys principle

4
Introducing asset

• asset in Technical Terms
• Requires
• Servlet-Enabled web server (Apache, Tomcat)
• SQL Database (MySQL)
• LDAP server (optional)
• Exclusively Java (servlets supporting classes)
• Easily configurable (we hope)

5
Registered Users View

• Registered User a person defined as a user
  inside asset
• Local user ID independent from other user IDs
• Institutional standard institutional ID and
  password via LDAP
• Can create and maintain surveys
• Can submit surveys in temporary mode
• Can view and export survey results
• Note Could easily allow registered asset
  access via LDAP-defined categories instead of
  manually creating asset user accounts
• http//localhost8080/examples/servlet/asset.Asse
  t

6
Respondents View

• Respondent subject taking the survey
• No password (anonymous survey)
• Survey-specific password
• Survey access-list mixing local subjects and
  LDAP-authorized subjects
• Access via URL
• http//localhost8080/examples/servlet/asset.Asset
  Survey?surveyid1
• Requires user name, password, survey password
• Stored Data
• Machine IP and date
• User name (anonymized for voting)
• Actual survey responses

7
Researchers View

• Researcher person accessing survey data
• Survey owner has access by default
• Grant access to registered asset users
• Grant access to anyone (public survey)
• Online Summaries
• Response counts
• Simple data summaries and lists
• Depends on survey element type
• Download Data
• SPSS (.sps syntax file)
• Excel (.csv delimited file)http//localhost808
  0/examples/servlet/asset.data.Liststart SPSS
  with sample data file

8
Administrators View

• Administrator who maintains asset system
• All day-to-day maintenance from inside asset
• Two administrative users (asset and root)
• Can edit all surveys and see all survey data
• Standard Tasks
• Create/edit registered asset users
• Monitor system resources
• Change survey ownership
• Advise users on survey design

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asset as Voting Tool

• Vote survey with controlled anonymous access
• Survey with list-based access restriction
• Survey Status set to anonymous
• Subjects take survey at most once
• Create appropriate voting questions
• Asset records who submits vote when, but removes
  personal information from response data
• Can automatically send email to all members,
  members who did not yet vote, or members who
  already voted
• Can quickly see who voted but can not find out
  what votes they submitted
• Data summary available when survey is closed

10
Programmers View

• Programmer installs asset for local use and/or
  modifies asset source code
• asset at Seton Hall maintained by undergraduate
  CS students
• Free trial-usage on SHU system as guest
• Free usage (for now) on SHU system for
  educational institutions
• Free downloadable source code for your own
  installation
• No (guaranteed) support 0 x 0 help desk
  assistanceasset is part of our Thinklets
  collection of Java programs and applets

11
Database Tables
12
asset Package Overview
13
Servlet Hierarchy
14
Survey Element Classes
15
Helper Classes

• SQLHelper handles (virtually) all interactions
  with SQL server (SQLTable stores small SQL
  tables)
• HTMLHelper provides standard menus, filters,
  conversion methods to ensure uniform look
• Authenticator provides methods ldapCheck and
  localCheck to return true or throw Exception
• MailHelper very simple class to send SMTP mail
• General contains asset configuration constants
  (base icon directory, LDAP server, SMTP server,
  SQL server login info)

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Check out asset

• To try out asset
• http//repository.itd.shu.edu/servlets/asset.Asset
  
• Login as guest, password seton hall, and
  login as local user
• To download the package
• Wait until this weekend (Dec. 16th, 2002)
• http//sciris.shu.edu/thinklets/
• Comments
• Bert Wachsmuth (wachsmut_at_shu.edu)