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One hundred and thirty-two people completed our online questionnaire about ideas for the next NZSSN Summer Short Course Programme. Thank you all very much for your valuable input. The lucky winner of a free course enrolment has been notified by email.
Possibly the most exciting result was that almost all of the respondents indicated that they would be likely to attend a short course at the next NZSSN summer programme! The other results are discussed below. They have left us with many decisions to make. There were a number of proponents for both of the locations in which we have run courses before, but Wellington was the very clear preference, with 89 respondents opting for it as opposed to 32 for Auckland. Eight participants suggested Christchurch or another South Island option as an alternative/new location for our courses. Our short courses have so far always been run in the summer, but this is obviously not the only option. In the questionnaire we suggested two different two week periods - in February 2009, and June/July 2009, respectively - and asked respondents to make a choice. The majority (84) opted for the usual February time slot. One respondent pointed out that these needn't be mutually exclusive options, but at this time we really are only looking to run one programme per year. Interestingly (and not surprisingly), the preference for summertime was much more visible among those opting for Wellington (60 to 29) than Auckland (19 to 12). In terms of the courses to be run, we suggested all of the courses that have been run in NZSSN's past programmes, divided into the two weeks that they have run over. For the first week options, the numbers were especially good for Introduction to NVivo (39) and Using Mixed Methods in Research and Program Evaluation (54), the latter of which has always been a popular course. For the second week options suggested, there were very pleasing numbers across the board. More details are tabulated below for all courses. We also provided a list of topics on which people might want courses run, in order to see where we should look for expanding our repertoire. The most popular choices in this section were Survey Design (53) and Advanced SPSS (40). The possibility of running courses on such topics of course depends heavily upon the availability of tutors and in the first instance their time to prepare course content, but it was very useful to be able to gauge interest in these areas. Again, thank you. Finally, we opened the floor to respondents to suggest further course topics and/or provide general comments on NZSSN's short course programmes. There were a few ideas around Introduction to Quantitative Research Techniques and suggestions that options like our Introduction to Statistics are too specific. This sort of thing could potentially be worked into a future Survey Design course. Other comments offered suggestions about the design of the questionnaire, and these will be looked into next time. Comments around the fee structure will also be taken into account. 
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