We're coming to the close of a student digitization project and would like to have them fill out a short, simple, anonymous survey about their experience. The class is a first-year history class (17 students, seminar style) titled American Women's History. The project involved choosing materials from our library Special Collections about a specific person (Consuelo Northrup Bailey), scanning the documents (mostly letters), transcribing them, encoding them (TEI), researching her life, then building an Omeka exhibit that describes the arch of her life and career in the context of the themes of the course. The project involved 5 class sessions where most of the work was done, and will be worth 25% of their grade.
We want to find out if they enjoyed the project (especially as it was not written into the course description that they saw when they registered!) and if they have any suggestions. We hope to use their responses to support additional similar projects next semester while building a workable process, and handbook, for integrating more of these types of projects into other courses.
The kinds of questions I'm considering are roughly:
- Did you enjoy the project?
- The project was divided into five sections: scanning, transcribing, encoding, researching, building the exhibit. Of the five which did you find the easiest/hardest? most interesting/least interesting? had enough time/not enough time?
- If you had a choice between two versions of the same course, one with this type of project and one with a more traditional research paper, which would you choose?
- Consider the amount of work you put into this project. What would you equate that to in a more traditional project/assignment? (a 5-7 page research paper, a 10-13 page research paper? studying for an exam, a ...?
- an open question like: what would you do differently, what would you like to more of or some such.
- a question related to the choice of topic: would you prefer to choose your own subject...?
- what else???
Has anyone done this type of survey or have suggestions for questions? And as long as we're about it, do you have any questions you would like me to ask the students? I'd be happy to share the data once done.
- Hope
