Instant Instruction Feedback Forms

Instant Instruction Feedback Forms are web-based surveys that are designed to offer librarians a simple way to evaluate their information literacy/bibliographic instruction sessions. These forms are open source software and are available for free download under the GNU General Public License.

Please feel free to customize the code to best meet your needs. These programs were written while I was a graduate student at Indiana University. The HTML forms were written by Gwendolyn Buchanan and the evaluation questions were written by Carrie Donovan and Sarah Beaubien, with help from the book "Evaluating Library Instruction" by Francine M. DeFranco & Richard Bleiler (2003).

How Do I Use Them?

One form is for students to complete at the conclusion of an instruction session and one is for the class instructor to submit after their students have had the opportunity to implement the skills/strategies explored in the session. If your library instruction classroom has computer workstations, you can direct the class to the forms by writing the URL to the student feedback form on the board. I recommend walking around the room to monitor the class (a great way to increase the response rate!). If your classroom doesn't supply computers for your students, you may want to include the URL on instruction handouts and encourage the class to log on and fill them out in their spare time. A friendly email reminder to the class instructor should be sufficient to get feedback about the students' post-instruction research performance.

How Do They Work?

The Instant Instruction Feedback Forms are simple web forms that will send user feedback directly to the email address of your choice. The programs are written in php and require very little tinkering to get them ready for use. The download contains five files that are zipped into one compressed file called forms.zip. The files are:

  1. instructor-survey.php
  2. student-survey.php
  3. survey.css (stylesheet)
  4. COPYING (a plain text file containing the license)
  5. logo.gif (a place-holder image)

Implementing the forms only requires access to a web server and a smidgen of UNIX and HTML know-how. The following steps will get you up and running in no time!

  1. Click the "Download" button above to download forms.zip.
  2. Upload forms.zip to the web directory on your php-enabled server.
  3. To extract the files, enter unzip forms.zip from the command line.
  4. This will create a directory called forms containing all of the files mentioned above.
  5. Now you have to change the email address in each of the forms to the address that you'd like to have your feedback sent to. If you scan through the code for the forms you'll find the following indicator: YOUR EMAIL GOES HERE -> -> ->.
  6. At this point the forms should be fully functional. The final step is to customize the forms. replace the "Your Logo Here" image with your library's logo (or you can just delete it). The logo also has a link that should be changed so that it points to your homepage. You will also want to change the email link on the footer of the forms, and the URL for the "Visit our Homepage" link underneath the form submission confirmation message.

You're done! To see what the forms will look like (before customization), click the following links:

Questions or Comments?

Please drop me an email if you have any suggestions, problems, or feedback. If you make improvements to the code or add functionality I'd love to hear about it. I'd also like to develop an FAQ here based on the comments that I get from users, so let me know what you think!