Flashlight Online is currently used by 97 institutions around the world and the number grows almost every month. As of August 2003, over 15,000 surveys had been created since Flashlight Online was created, attracting over 1.5 million responses. Flashlight Online is one of most flexible, cost-effective ways to do surveys of any type. It's also one of the most powerful ways to study educational uses of technology.

Here are just a few of the studies that Flashlight Online can help faculty, departments, offices and entire institutions do:

• How can I improve participation in online discussions and teamwork in my course?
• How can I use PowerPoint presentations more effectively?
• Which activities that I use in my course work better online and which work better face-to-face?
• How does the instructional effectiveness of our distance learning courses compare with our campus courses? Can we assess whether effectiveness improves over the next few years?
• Is the technological infrastructure adequately available and working well-enough to give students "real" access to online courses and resources?
• How well are our institution's online student services working for learners?
• Is our Information Literacy program meeting our learners' needs?

Flashlight Online features:

Flashlight Online provides a variety of kinds of help for swiftly creating surveys, especially surveys of education, and educational uses of technology:

• Write your own survey items, using over a dozen question formats in the system.
• Search our database of almost 500 validated items from the Current Student Inventory. Many of these items are based on the "seven principles of good practice in undergraduate education," enabling users to study ways in which technology use is, or isn't, enabling improving learning processes and outcomes.
• Use surveys created by Flashlight staff and other institutions as templates to create your own studies, or use the models "as is."  Click here to see a list of just a few of these templates.
• Use drafts or item banks created by colleagues, or 'publish' your own drafts and item banks on the system for them to use.

Opportunities for help don't stop with the authoring process. You can share or pool data with other investigators at your institution and at other Flashlight Online institutions. TLT Group staff can help you create a multi-institution group of authors with interests similar to your own.

Flashlight Online is loaded with other powerful features, too, including the ability to print surveys for paper response or to gather data online; to customize the survey using familiar Web editing tools; to administer large numbers of user accounts easily; to get simple analyses of data directly from the system or to easily download raw data to your own statistical software.  Click here to see a survey created with Flashlight Online. 

Flashlight Online has become a very popular system. Over 15,000 surveys have been created with it as of July 2004, drawing over 1.5 million responses. Flashlight Online is used for general purpose surveys as well as for studies of educational uses of technology.