It seems that now my time in the department is coming to an end I’m starting to notice more and more ways in which things could be improved. One thing that has shocked me over this weekend is the speed in which you can effectively collect data online. Now I know online studies in the student population are more effective. I’m guessing that it due to the fact that you can collect RPS credits whilst still laying in bed. However, I put a study online for a final year project student on Friday evening, and it’s already collected eighty eight participants. Now you may be thinking that eighty eight people really isn’t that many in approximately two days. Well you have to take into consideration the following:
- Many students are no longer need to collect credits, and in general they don’t participate in extra studies
- Most of the students are focusing on exam revisions (well at least that is what they tell us)
- For those students not revising, and not partying hard, they are focusing on writing up their project proposals/dissertations/essays
- Oh and it is a weekend of sun shine, need I say anymore
So to get this number of people, this quickly is pretty impressive. Considering the student in question only came to me a couple of weeks ago, and the deadline for the whole project is less than a month away, its rather lucky. However, I just wondering the number of other studies that we could possibly convert to run via the web, which would make it easier to collect larger amounts of information, or just run studies more quickly. Obviously there are some limitations such as experiments that require timing constraints, but, well there is plenty of scope for some of the studies that are conducted to be transferred.