I posted recently about our 13-school peer comparison group for the 2006 PSOL and how this would be our best group for benchmarking since they are all two year schools. It is also necessary to look a little deeper to make sure that the respondents are similar so I compared the demographics of the two [...]

PSOL Strengths for Lake Superior College
Our 2006 Institutional report for the Noel-Levitz PSOL identified the following strengths for LSC Online (listed in rank order beginning with the strongest item).
I’ve had a few discussions with Noel-Levitz representatives about how I think the “strengths” need to be redefined. Right now the strengths are what I would call [...]

On September 13, 2006, I received new data from Noel-Levitz regarding the PSOL (Priorities Survey for Online Learners) that we gave for the third year in a row during spring semester 2006. The data have always been useful but the report received today is the most useful for benchmarking that we have ever received.
Coming [...]

In July 2006 I attended the annual Noel-Levitz conference in Denver. The first day was a client workshop on the various N-L surveys of student satisfaction and importance, such as the SSI (Student Satisfaction Inventory) and the PSOL (Priorities Survey for Online Learners). They had just updated the overall results for the PSOL. [...]

Click screenshots to enlarge. These two charts above show the survey results from 2004 from two different Noel-Levitz surveys at LSC. The N-L Student Satisfaction Inventory (SSI) is given to a sample of student taking traditional on-ground (or Face-to-Face or F2F) courses. This post deals with six questions that appear [...]

Noel-Levitz surveys are generally of very high quality and the PSOL fits that description. It is the only nationally-normed satisfaction survey that focuses on the online learners that I was aware of when we first used it in 2004. Using it three years in a row gave us a good baseline for measuring overall satisfaction [...]

The PSOL is made up of various types of questions. A PDF of the survey is available here. Please keep in mind that this survey is the copyrighted property of Noel-Levitz.

The most useful information comes from the 36 Priorities questions. There are 26 standard questions (used for national averages) and you can add 10 more [...]

This blog will be used to document, publicize, and share the results from the Priorities Survey for Online Learners (PSOL). This survey has been administered in 2004, 2005, and 2006 at Lake Superior College. The next planned adminisrtation is in Spring 2008.
The survey is produced and managed by Noel-Levitz.