From ICommons wiki

[edit] About the Volunteer Survey

• Summary
  The survey protocol below includes nine questions, which relevant OER projects can use to understand volunteer perceptions around the recruitment process, the content authoring process, and the communication channels that support volunteer work. The survey questions were originally written for Free High School Science Texts (FHSST), an OER project that relies on volunteers and a content authoring platform to create free-to-use textbooks for South African high school students.

• Tips for Reuse
  We invite other OER projects to revise and augment the survey questions below to meet local situations, practices, and needs. Depending upon which communication channels are most used or best suited to a given OER project, the "localized" survey questions can, e.g., be posted on an OER project's intranet, sent via email to project members, or used as prompts for face-to-face discussions with project team members. For OER projects that do not rely on volunteers, the questions can serve as a way to spark thinking around new questions that cultivate understandings about other project communities.

• Invitation to Participate
  We invite OER project and community members to comment and suggest other questions that may need to be asked to understand volunteer perceptions, or to share additional ideas on how the protocol can be used within an OER project. Simply create an account for this wiki, and add your comments to the bottom of the page.

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[edit] Volunteer Survey

Thank you in advance for your participation in this survey, which will help in our efforts to evaluate volunteer recruitment and volunteer support activities. The survey should take approximately 20 minutes. Please note that all responses are voluntary, and will remain anonymous in any write-ups of the information collected. Please return your completed survey to [insert name] at [insert email address] by [insert date].

1. What prompted you to participate in [name of OER project] and what keeps you coming back?

2. Have you encouraged others to participate in the project? If so, please explain whom you recruited and why.

3. What do you think would be the best way for the project to recruit more volunteers?

4. What suggestions would you offer volunteers who are new to the project?

5. How would you describe your typical activities within the content authoring system?

6. What supports, tools or practices (e.g., feedback from other volunteers and the admin team, hackathons, the forums, the activity work space, etc.) have been most helpful in facilitating your ability to complete assignments and contribute content? Please explain.

7. Please provide a specific example of a hurdle you faced in contributing content and how the project could have assisted you in addressing that hurdle.

8. If you could change one thing about the project, what would it be? Please explain.

9. Please complete the following:

• When I need to communicate with the project admin team or with other volunteers, I ________________________________________________

• I think it would be easier to communicate and interact with other volunteers and the admin team if ________________________________________

• I would like the monthly updates or other communications to include something about _____________________________________________

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[edit] Comments and Suggestions

I would like to ask how the survey responses are analysed (ie: info gathered, segmented) as this will help various projects once they have gathered the data. In other words, phase 1 would be to create the survey and phase 2 would be to analyse the findings of the survey, and how to take/ make meaning from them which could then be then incorporated back into the project.