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Documentation for Flashlight Online 2.0 l
Advanced video tutorials for using 2.0
l Flashlight Evaluation
Handbook (how to do productive studies)
This page has gateways to four
alternative ways of learning to use Flashlight Online 2.0.
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Prefer participating in live
online workshops? check the
calendar button
above for the next scheduled session.
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Prefer watching step-by-step
instructions, but at your own time and place?
Watch this archive of a step-by-step training session.
Session 1
teaches the basics and demonstrates the new features
introduced on February 6, 2010.
Session 2 teaches how to create and use matrix surveys.
Each archive is about an hour long.
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Prefer using a handbook with
detailed written instructions?
Click here for the documentation for the Skylight engine
that powers Flashlight Online; it's taking shape on
a wiki and gets better every week.
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Or, like many of us, do you
prefer to sit figure out Flashlight Online by using it?
That's what this page is for. Whenever you feel puzzled,
look at the list of issues below, and find the answer. The issues below are listed in the approximate
order in which they might be encountered as you log-in
and begin creating your first survey, rubric, ballot or
other online form. If you can't find your question,
contact us at flashlight <at> tltgroup.org; we'll create
a tutorial to demonstrate the answer and add it here as
quickly as we can.
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My password has stopped
working. What do I do?
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(NEW!)
I just logged onto
Flashlight Online for the first time in awhile and it
looks different than in January 2009. Where are my folders?
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Explain
the survey list (home) screen
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In
the "Properties" tab, what are "Description," "Goals"
and "metadata"? (e.g., how do I write the
introductory page to my survey, the page respondents see
first before they see my questions)
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How
do I start writing questions?
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What kinds of
questions can I write?
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Show me how the
"Questions" interface is organized.
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How do I copy questions from an older
survey (e.g., Flashlight Online 1.0) into Flashlight
Online 2.0?
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I'm looking for a button (e.g., copy,
paste, reorder) but can't find it
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Show me how to reorder pages, questions and elements.
(under construction)
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How do
I use Question Groups to create a Matrix Survey?
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How do I tailor the text for
each different Respondent Pool?
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Where is
the URL for my survey? What is a "respondent pool"
and how do I create one?
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Uploading respondent pool and respondent emails; unique
URLs; one-time use surveys
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Where
are my responses (data)?
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How
can I get access to surveys, item banks, rubrics and
other online forms created by Flashlight staff, and
other Flashlight Online authors? How can I give other
people the right to copy surveys and other material that
I created?
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Known Bugs
Many people like to learn how to use new
technology on their own: little or no use of training,
manuals, etc. If you're one of those folks, this page
is for you. Go ahead and use Flashlight Online 2.0 to
create a survey: each time you
get stuck, glance down this page to look for the answer.
If you don't see what you need below, send an email
to flashlight @ tltgroup.org immediately -- describe where
you're stuck; we'll help you, and we'll add a new note to
this page.
If, on the other hand, you prefer a
single demonstration showing how to use the system to create
a simple survey,
click here to see an hour-long archive of an August
20, 2009 training session, demonstrating and discussing how
to create a survey, step by step. Here is the
hour-long second session, showing how to create a matrix
survey. Here is the
home page for that
workshop, including resource links.
On February 6, the development team plans to
upgrade Flashlight Online 2.0. There will be at least
three major changes in the system, as
this video demonstrates,
as well as some minor tweaks:
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Because the password authentication
system is being changed (moving off the Washington State
Friend ID system -FID), you'll need to reset your
password. You can use the same password as before, or
alter it. (The new system does not demand the complex
password that the old system did.)
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The look of the Survey list (directory)
display will change almost completely. A pull down menu
near the top controls what you see below: a list of
folders and a list of surveys. This is laying the
groundwork to give authors the ability to share folders,
share surveys, or both.
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A new question type has been added: an
advanced rubric.
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Surveys are organized into folders. Up until
Feb. 6, you will find the folders on the left. When
the name of a folder is highlighted, you can see its
contents on the right.
Create more folders
to store and share your surveys, item banks, rubrics and
other online forms by clicking the "create" button.
After February 6, in order to create a new folder,
first shift to the "All Folders" view..
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To create a survey,
first click on the folder in which you'd like to permanently
store the survey and its data. Then click the "create"
button. TIP: There is no
"move" command so, to move a survey from one folder to
another, you need to copy it (this copies the survey, not
the data), paste a copy into a new folder and then, if you
want, delete the original.
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to copy one of those
surveys (to be pasted later in some other folder, for
example), click the box beside its title and then click
"copy". Then highlight the folder where you want to put
copy, and "paste."
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to delete one or more of
those surveys, click their boxes and then click the
delete button.
Not clear?
Click here for a 5
minute video tour of the home page. Want a preview
of the new Survey List page (with the ability to share
individual surveys and many other new features)?
Click here for a demo of the prototype; the upgrade is
scheduled for late December 2009.
"Description" is the material that will
appear on the first page of your survey, before the
questions: explanations, persuading your respondents to
think about their answers, telling them what you'll do with
their data.
"Goals" is a field that only you and other
Flashlight users can see; this is where you should keep
notes about what you'd like to accomplish with this form.
"Metadata" describing the entire survey is
only partly implemented as of Fall 2009. Flashlight
Online is scheduled to get a "Search" feature that will allow
authors to search for surveys and other forms online by using words and phrases.
You'll be able to search your own surveys and also surveys written by other authors, even authors at
other institutions. By labeling your own surveys using
metadata here, it will be
easier for you and others to find them later on. (You can
also 'tag' question groups and questions.)
Create a survey by clicking the "create"
button on the right side of the Survey List screen (the
screen you see immediately after logging in). Name your
survey. Click the "Questions" button and you'll see the
Questions interface (the survey editor). Click the
"new question" button near the bottom of the page. Pick a
question type and fill in the form. Then save.
When you're first starting to use Flashlight
Online, try creating a dummy survey and use every question
type at least once, just to see what they each can do.
Here is a sample survey containing every kind of question
and rubric that you can create using templates in this
system.
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A
question group
is the smallest chunk of content that some of your
respondents will see and other won't. (If, at some
point, you want some people to see a part of a question
group, but not the rest, then divide that group into two
groups.) Traditional surveys have only one question
group; everyone gets all the questions. Matrix
surveys usually have two or more question groups so that
different groups of questions go to different people.
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A question group can have
one or more pages.
(You might want to use multiple pages in order to reduce
scrolling.) You can easily reorder pages within a
question group.
TIP: If you don't give each page a title,
your respondent will see "Untitled Page" at the top of
that page. As you finish writing your questions,
use your web browser to search for "Untitled Page", to
make sure that you given every page a name. If
you want respondents to see a blank at the top of a
page, put a space in this field.
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A page can contain one or
more questions.
You can easily reorder questions within a page.
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A question can contain
one or more elements.
You can easily reorder elements within a question.
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Open a
browser window for 2.0 and size it so that it takes up
roughly half your computer screen. On the other half, place
the original survey (e.g., browser window for 1.0 or other
web-based system; word processing file). Then copy the
question, one chunk at a time. It's easier and faster than
you might think, as this
5
minute video demo shows. For more information on
making the switch from Flashlight Online 1.0 to 2.0,
click here.
Buttons only appear when they can be used.
For example, if you have copied a question but have not yet
copied an element, you'll see a paste question button but no
paste element button. If you have only one page in your
survey so far, you will not (yet) see a "reorder pages"
button.
Buttons almost always appear above the
material to which they apply." "Create new question" appears
at the top of the last existing question on that page.
"Create new page" appears at the top of the last page in
that Question Group.
"Create" and "reorder" buttons appear on the
left, while the editing and delete buttons appear on the
right.
TIP: Looking for a metadata
button? At this writing (January 2010) you need to click the
"Question properties" button in order to enter metadata for
that question. Metadata for survey as a whole is entered on
the "Properties" page for the survey.
The metadata for each respondent pool
determines which question groups those people will see.
If a question group has no metadata (which is the default),
all respondent pools see it. If the question group has
metadata, then only respondent pools with identical metadata
will see that question group. TIP: For a
question group, metadata is entered by clicking "Edit
Question Group" on the right side of the screen.
Here's a page with more
explanation, and a link to a video tutorial.
TIP: At this writing (July
2009), question groups cannot be reordered easily. So it's
worth thinking in advance about which groups you need and in
what order they should appear to your respondents.
A respondent pool is simply a set
of people who all get exactly the same form: same questions,
same wording, same everything. In a traditional survey,
there is only one respondent pool because everyone has the
same experience. (Even in surveys with skip patterns,
everyone has the same form.) In contrast, Flashlight
Online offers you the option of creating any number of
respondent pools for the same survey: in other words,
authors can decide in advance that different sets of
respondents will get different mixes of questions, and/or
different wording of the survey. In addition, respondent
pools make it easier to break a large group of respondents
down into subsets, which can be analyzed separately, in
clumps, or all as one pool.
To create a respondent pool,
on the home page of your survey, click the button on the
left that says "Respondents." that takes you to the
"Respondent Pool List." Then click the button that says
"create" and fill in the form.
Creating the URL for a respondent
pool: begin by defining (creating) that
respondent pool. When you click 'save', it closes
the pool form. Double click on the name of the pool to
open the form again. A tab saying "URLs" now should be
visible on the right side. Click
the URLs tab to see what that URL is for administering
the survey.
For a show-and-tell about how to create the
respondent pools and URL(s) for
your survey, click here.
Sometimes precision can be increased by
using different language for different respondent pools. For
example, instead of asking students in different classes a
question about 'the last assignment', supply the name of
that assignment, different or each course.
Here's a video showing how to do it.
The answer to all those
questions are the same: you create respondent pools using
the "email personal URL" option as the delivery type.
In order to use this option, you need to have a working
email address for each of your respondents. By inputting
these email addresses, you can:
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Tailor each person's
experience (even making elements of the survey unique to
that individual)
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email the person the URL
for his or her survey
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email the person
reminders about the survey (with the option of sending
follow up messages only to people who have not yet
responded)
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maintain the anonymity
of the data (even though you know the group of people
who have responded)
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prevent respondents from
answering more than once. Each person can partly fill in
the survey, come back later, reopen the URL and complete
the survey. But once they have clicked "Finish," their
URL will no longer work.
This
11 minute eClip demonstrates step by step how to create one
or more respondent pools with a unique URL for each person,
and how to send emails to some or all of those people.
And click here for documentation on
how to do a batch upload of data that defines all respondent
pools and respondents in one step.
On your survey's home page, the "Reports"
button leads to all your data. The custom report
feature allows you to pre-design a report or set of reports
you might want to create each time you repeat use of your
survey.
TIP: If you'd just like to
see, or show, a quick report on one respondent pool, go to
"Respondents" instead. The blue 'rate' button for each pool
is linked to a report on responses from that particular
pool.
TIP: The quick reports (for
the whole survey and for each respondent pool) are on the
open web. Send the URL to anyone and they'll be able to see
the data in their browser, even if they do not have
Flashlight Online accounts. Put that URL in the "Finish URL"
field (for the whole survey or for a respondent pool), and
that set of respondents will see that particular report as
soon as they click "Finish" on their survey. If they
bookmark the URL, they can return and see responses from
people who responded most recently.
TIP: Did you test
your survey but then not see any responses in the report?
The most common reason for this is a glitch related to
browsers. First the author creates a 'preview' of a
survey (which doesn't accept data). IF the author then uses
the same browser for the URL for the real survey, the
preview will show up again - the URLs are quite long and
most browsers do an autocomplete and open the preview, not
the real survey. So, when the author inserts some
phony responses to test the real survey, the responses
aren't recorded, and the report is empty. Solution: use a
different browser (or quit, and then restart the browser):
this should enable the real survey to open and be tested.
How can I get access to
surveys, item banks, rubrics and other online forms created
by Flashlight staff, and other Flashlight Online authors?
How can I give other people the right to copy surveys and
other material that I created?
To see how to enable other authors of your
choice to see, copy and adapt your material,
watch this brief
video. If you try giving someone access to a
folder and receive the error message, "One or more of the
email addresses you entered did not match any of the
accounts in the system," it's likely for one of three
reasons:
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No user can be given access to a folder
until after he or she has logged into Flashlight Online
2.0 at least once. (It’s not enough to get a password
successfully; the user also has to log into the system).
Until that point, Flashlight Online doesn’t recognize
the user so any attempt to give that user access to a
folder results in the error message you saw.
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Check to make sure that is no typo in
the email address.
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Many people have more than one email
address; if they create their account using email
address #1 as their ID, and someone else tries to give
folder access to email address #2, that same error
message will result.
TIP: To find out more
about materials potentially available to you (materials that
can be put on your Flashlight Online desktop), ask
your local Flashlight Online
administrator. If you
are the institutional contact and would like an update
about available surveys, item banks, rubrics and other
online forms, please email flashlight at tltgroup.org.
Flashlight Online 2.0 is going to develop
steadily over the next few years. Programming time at
Washington State University is limited so not all bugs can
be fixed quickly. At this writing (September 23,
2009), here are a couple of bugs that should be
fixed in a week or so:
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The 'delete' command doesn't always
work. Sometimes after you confirm that, yes, that you
really do want to delete a survey, or a piece of a
survey, the screen will refresh and once again ask you
if you want to delete. If this happens, try clicking
'no' this time and see if the material has indeed been
deleted. If it hasn't, try leaving the survey or system,
then coming back to try again. If that still doesn't
work, email us (flashlight @ tltgroup dot org)
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The command to reorder scales in a
multiple scale question is temporarily not working.
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This is not a bug, but it is a
predictable problem: Flashlight Online is a web-based
system and can take time to react to commands. If
you issue a string of commands one after another (e.g.,
deleting several different 'leaves' in a survey
question, one after another) and you issue a second
command before the first has executed, the system can
give you a warning message. If that happens, save your
work, leave the survey, and then reopen it.
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