A Comparison Of Electronic Surveying By E Mail And Web

Abstract

In recent years the scholarship of teaching has gained increasing recognition in engineering education as a legitimate and valuable faculty activity. Growing numbers of faculty members engaged in educational research have been using surveys as principal components of their assessment programs. These researchers quickly discover that using individual interviews or paper forms to get responses is extremely time-consuming and often prohibitively expensive, and they turn instead to electronic surveys. The two main vehicles for such surveys are e-mail and World Wide Web-based forms. Web surveys are attractive since they allow for automatic tabulation and analysis of responses, but there is a concern that the additional effort they require of respondents could lead to a severe reduction in response rate.