PERL Miscellaneous - Building a Perl based online survey and data gathering, reporting and analysis tool

Author

Building a Perl based online survey and data gathering, reporting and analysis tool

George_V

2004-10-05, 4:04 am

Hi all. First up - I'm not a programmer. I'm researching for an online
survey and data analysis tool for Monash University, Australia.

Our developers are keen on a Perl solution. I've found some Perl form
generators and basic survey tools, but we need something that has
powerful gathering, reporting and analysis capability.

I have included a wish list of our requirements, hopefully they'll
make enough sense to give you an idea of what we're after. If anyone
knows of a single Perl based package or any useful modules that could
be added onto a front end to build a complete package I would be most
grateful for your info.

Wishlist:

*Questions* based on a standardised 5-point scale (strongly agree ->
strongly disagree) + don't know/unable to judge and doesn't
apply/inappropriate.
*Flexibility*: We would like to create survey form templates that can
be easily adapted by untrained academic staff, to satisfy differing
evaluation requirements across various units. This may involve adding
or subtracting questions from the survey.

*Distribute and Gathering*:

* Generate Scantron/Word document (could be PDF and published online)
* Configure: optional reminders; notifications; closing dates, etc.
* Define respondent grouping based on student or unit attributes
* Notify respondents: email, messaging
* Reports on responses and response rates inc. timestamp (into
database…?)
* Ticketing facility for identifying non-respondents
* Capacity for distinguishing between cohorts based on LDAP
attributes/ Sending them different questionnaires / Interactive
questionnaires with branching
* Support both qualitative and quantitative questions / Process for
removing identifying information
* Massage data from scan sheets into the database
* Generate scan sheets from electronic surveys
* Audit trails (date completed, etc.)

**Reporting and analysis:**

* Access control: initially only at Faculty level (further access
control offline)
* User enquiries (standard database for arbitrary reports)
* Access to past reports / saved queries
* Queries students or by question
* Simple reports should happen within a minute, complex reports can
happen within 24 hours
* Time-series analyses require ad hoc access for last five years
* Compare against previous time taught
* Compare against same teaching period previous year
* Analysis of both qualitative and quantitative questions
* Qualitative looks for frequently repeated words/sentences to
identify themes of feedback
* Audit trails (reports run, by whom, etc.)
* Unique identification of reports (timestamp)
* Extract data in an Excel-friendly format (.csv/.xls)[color=darkred]

Many thanks for taking the time to look this over. Cheers. GeorgeV.

Abigail

2004-10-05, 4:04 am

George_V (George.Vidalis@its.monash.edu.au) wrote on MMMMLIII September
MCMXCIII in <URL:news:cd616041.0410042253.54a74c1a@posting.google.com>:
-- Hi all. First up - I'm not a programmer. I'm researching for an online
-- survey and data analysis tool for Monash University, Australia.
--
-- Our developers are keen on a Perl solution. I've found some Perl form
-- generators and basic survey tools, but we need something that has
-- powerful gathering, reporting and analysis capability.
--
-- I have included a wish list of our requirements, hopefully they'll
-- make enough sense to give you an idea of what we're after. If anyone
-- knows of a single Perl based package or any useful modules that could
-- be added onto a front end to build a complete package I would be most
-- grateful for your info.

If you are looking for a canned solution, why does the language it's
written in matter?

Nevertheless, this group is about the programming language Perl. Not
about software that happens to be written in Perl. If you would program
whatever you need in Perl yourself, and have any questions, feel free
to ask.

Abigail
--
perl -Mstrict -we '$_ = "goto _.print chop;\n=rekcaH lreP rehtona tsuJ";_1:eval'

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