We expect to receive our 2008 PSOL results any day now. This will be our fourth year of using the same instrument to gather data about importance and satisfaction for our online offerings and services. This year we had a 23% response rate with 458 students submitting the survey out of the pool of 2,012 students who were invited to do so. All students taking at least one online course at LSC are invited to submit the survey.

The last time we used the survey was in Spring 2006. We only had a 17% submission rate (325 out of 1,889). In an effort to significantly improve the submission rate, this year we offered 40 (2 GB) flash drives by random drawing to those who submitted the survey. There were no incentives on 2006.

For about $440 ($11 per USB drive) we were able to gather data from a more significant group of our online students. I’m thinking that was well worth it. Now we need to find out what they had to say to us.