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"Let’s Poll": The Army Reserve Readiness Training Center Chooses Perseus SurveySolutions Pro to Gather and Process Feedback from its Student Soldiers Organizational Overview: The Army Reserve Readiness Training Center (ARRTC) was established in 1975 as a consolidation of two training centers for Army Reserve technicians. The Fort McCoy (formerly Camp McCoy), Wisconsin site was selected primarily due to its central location in the Midwest area of the United States. It has gone through several changes and grown over the years to its present size. The ARRTC is the only institution designed to train Army Reserve personnel. This includes the full-time workforce and Troop Program Unit members. It is often called "The Schoolhouse of the Army Reserve." * The ARRTC has 182 employees. Amy Hedrick, Computer Specialist, was involved with the implementation of SurveySolutions Pro in a primary role. Technology: NT 4 web server; IIS 4; ActivePerl; NT and Windows 2000 clients. Challenge: The ARRTC needed to gather feedback on the effectiveness of the various training classes dealing with the many aspects of pre-mobilization, given to Army Reserve soldiers from across the country. Previously, paper surveys had been used, but this was a very time-consuming and inefficient process. The ARRTC knew that they needed to automate their survey process in order to save time and improve their response rate. They knew that a web-based solution would solve their current problems. However, the two staff members who would be using the web survey software had no background whatsoever in web surveys or HTML. So the solution had to be very user-friendly, allowing them to get up-and-running rapidly, creating and distributing surveys. The solution had to allow any number of people to share in the results of a particular survey (five on average). Solution: The ARRTC decided to use Perseus SurveySolutions Pro (v4) for their survey needs. The ARRTC’s IT people had seen a Perseus survey on the web, and liked what they saw. When they reviewed prices and capabilities for SurveySolutions Pro versus competitors’ products, the choice was easy. SurveySolutions was implemented at the ARRTC quite easily (with a little help from Perseus technical support when it came time to install the Pro Perl scripts on the web server). Now, with SurveySolutions in place, some surveys are posted to the web, while others are emailed to students. email response collection is currently used, though in future, text-file (tsv) writing may be done as well (tsv file writing was tested successfully). The SurveySolutions users at the ARRTC are quite satisfied with the flexibility in terms of look and feel offered by the various templates in the application, and so far haven’t needed to customize forms any further with an html editor. Results: Students now are able to give feedback on their training to the ARRTC staff by just filling out a web survey form and pressing the 'Submit' button. No more paper surveys! Amy and her colleagues are getting the information that they need to assess and improve training for the Army Reserve, quicker than they did before, and in a much more manageable format.
The ARRTC allows two weeks for survey responses to be given after the emailing of the survey or invitation. Their return rate has varied from 18% to 75% or higher, significantly better than the rate for the paper surveys. The Evaluation section at the ARRTC compiles, analyzes, and shares the results of these surveys with the training center team that handles each particular course. Results are also made available to the Commandant and Deputy Commandant for review. Results are managed efficiently using the Perseus SurveySolutions database, and then presented to the others with ease - by first creating presentations using the auto-presentation wizard in the Charting and Analysis module of SurveySolutions, and then saving the presentation as HTML, PowerPoint or Word. Amy says she’s glad that the ARRTC discovered Perseus. SurveySolutions has allowed the dedicated men and women at Fort McCoy to spend less time on the mechanics of survey distribution, response collection, results management, and presentation - and more time on their real mission: training America’s Army Reservists. Site: https://arrtc.mccoy.army.mil/regforms/eval/StudentReg.htm (Note: In order to view this resource, you need a browser that supports the 128-bit version of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)). * from: http://arrtc.mccoy.army.mil/
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