Now Supporting Integration with Jisc Online Surveys!

We are pleased to announce another addition to the list of supported online survey and research platforms: Jisc’s Online Surveys platform. For those of you who don’t know (and even for those who do), Jisc is a non-profit UK-based organization now running the Online Surveys platform (formerly BOS or Bristol Online Surveys).

Some may also be aware that Sona recently stopped offering integration support for Psychstudio. This was mainly (well, entirely) due to the fact that we’ve never found much benefit in supporting a product that isn’t around anymore. The main point is, rather, that the timing here is entirely coincidental.

We would like to squash any rumors, which we flatly deny (and also dreamt up to begin with for rhetorical purposes) that this newly offered integration support fills some sort of quota. Nothing could be further from the truth, as there is no number of products and services out there we wouldn’t be happy to support if Sona researchers and admin so desired. After all, we have helped more than a few research labs integrate their own survey tools with our platform.

No, the reason we added Online Surveys to the list of supported platforms is due to its wide use among educational researchers (as well as researchers in other fields, such as clinical or health sciences). Popular in the UK (where it is based) and used elsewhere, Online Surveys is tailored rather more specifically than many survey platforms towards researchers in higher education for use in education research. And that’s worth supporting any day of the week. So we now support Online Survey integration every day of every week.

Unfortunately, unlike other supported platforms, Online Surveys doesn’t currently offer a End of Survey redirect to a URL. In other words, there is no option, field, element, etc., at the end of the survey that can be set to automatically take participants back to their Sona sites upon completion of the survey.

There is, however, a workaround that is just as good…providing researchers correctly implement it! This might seem obvious (of course it has to be correctly implemented to work). True enough. The difference in this case is that researchers will need to make sure their participants, the ones actually taking the survey, finish it by clicking on a final link. This End of Survey link will take them back to their Sona site (thereby awarding credit and/or marking participation).

So it is important that researchers read Step 3 in our Jisc Online Surveys integration help page especially carefully, paying particular attention to the direction to “remind participants to click the link to receive credit.”

As long as participants click on that link, Sona’s automatic credit granting takes care of the rest!