What MITx students will learn about SurveyCTO

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SurveyCTO Data Explorer We’ve been collaborating with J-PAL for months on their MITx course “Designing and Running Randomized Evaluations” – and we’re excited that students will finally get to participate in the SurveyCTO activities we’ve helped design. (Note that if you aren’t enrolled in the current course, you can enroll now for the next round, which starts on June 5, 2017.)

Students will learn about why Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) is the preferred method for data collection (sorry, paper!) and how to approach the design and administration of digital projects. They’ll get hands-on practice taking a paper form and programming a digital version using SurveyCTO, learn how to set up high-frequency checks from their server console, and create a monitoring worksheet in the Data Explorer.

As part of our preparation for the course, we preloaded sample data onto each student’s server – and we’ve also made this sample data available to anyone running version 2.212 and above. If you’d like to play around with sample data in the Data Explorer, here’s what you need to do:

  1. Login to your server.
  2. On the Design tab, scroll down to the Your forms section, click Tools, and then click the new Add sample form button to add the sample form+data to your server.
  3. Go to the Monitor tab, scroll down to the Form submissions section, find “Sample household listing form with sample data” and click the Monitor form data button.

If you haven’t yet updated to version 2.212, getting access to sample data is as good an excuse as any. Just go to your Manage Subscription page to update for free.

Chris Robert

Founder

Chris is the founder of SurveyCTO. He now serves as Director and Founder Emeritus, supporting Dobility in a variety of part-time capacities. Over the course of Dobility’s first 10 years, he held several positions, including CEO, CTO, and Head of Product.

Before founding Dobility, he was involved in a long-term project to evaluate the impacts of microfinance in South India; developed online curriculum for a program to promote the use of evidence in policy-making in Pakistan and India; and taught statistics and policy analysis at the Harvard Kennedy School. Before that, he co-founded and helped grow an internet technology consultancy and led technology efforts for the top provider of software and hardware for multi-user bulletin board systems (the online systems most prominent before the Internet).