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Vision Statement

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Pattadon L edited this page Aug 29, 2023 · 2 revisions

Background

KU staff and students often want to conduct polls or surveys within KU, or within a unit or organization at KU. The polls or surveys provide input for making decisions, planning events, and learning others' preferences and ideas, but they aren't critical (like voting for a representative).

The most common poll/survey questions are multiple choice, where the poll taker selects a choice from a list of choices.

Vision

For the KU community who want to conduct surveys and polls open to the community, KU Polls is an easy to use web application that enables people to create or participate in poll and surveys, and view or modify one's choice any time during the polling period.

Our application has a simple procedure for creating polls, and allows everyone to see the results of a poll or survey.

Additional Detail

The opening and closing dates for each poll/survey question are optional. A question is not visible to web visitors before the opening date, and voting or modifying an existing vote is not allowed after the closing date, but the poll/survey and results can be viewed after the closing date.

Alternative Products and Solutions

There are other free web-based applications for conducting polls and surveys. Two such products are:

  • Google Forms - can have several types of questions including multiple choice, matrix, short answer, and free-form long answer. The form owner can manually enable/disable collecting responses and limit the scope to a Google organization.

  • Survey Monkey - claims to be the world's most popular application for online surveys. It offers a wide variety of forms and templates, including event registration, feedback forms, and evaluation forms.

These both have limitations or unwanted features.

  • Google Forms is clumsy and a returning visitor cannot see his previously submitted choices, but he can submit new choices if the form settings are set to allow it. Google Forms do not have a setting for automatic start and end dates; the form creator must manually enable/disable responses.

  • SurveyMonkey has limits on free forms, including a limit of 10 questions and limit on number of responses.

Main Features

  1. An authorized person can create poll or survey questions with multiple choices and a specified start and end date (the polling period). These date are optional; if not specified then a poll remains open indefinitely.
  2. Authenticated users can submit a response to any poll question during the polling period.
  3. A user can revisit a poll page to view his/her response, and can change it during the polling period.
  4. No responses or change to a response are allowed after a poll's end date.
  5. Poll questions are not visible before a poll's starting date.
  6. Anyone can view the results of a poll question at any time after the starting date, but only authorized users can vote for a poll.
  7. Voting may be restricted to people with a KU login.
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