In April I gave a LimeSurvey beginners course to a class of experienced survey designers (but not using LimeSurvey) of the Province of Antwerp in Belgium. Due to the Corona virus, I could not visit them, so the 1 day course was cut in three 2-hour online workshops, with some homework in between.
We prepared a custom installation of LimeSurvey (Version 3, since version 4 is not ready for production as of today), where each pupil could explore LimeSurvey (with maximum permissions, just to get to know the system) and make the first surveys. This playing around was inspiration for many questions in the third workshop, which was taylor made for answering these questions.
As it turned out, the experience of the class, gave them a head start of course, since they knew what they wanted. They knew how to accomplish this using their previous software (Socratos) and adapting to LimeSurvey was a process of getting to know where the fuctionality is hidden.
For beginners LimeSurvey often turns out to be somewhat overwhelming. In our experience this is software that has great value, but it does not show easily. Especially the Administrative User Interface (A-UI) could benefit from some design love & attention. This may also need extra help during the phase of getting to know LimeSurvey.
Still in search for a secure Open Source solution we ended up using Zoom, which gave us in the first workshop a generous upgrade to a session of 2,5 hours and for the second and third session we were forced to have a break after each 40 minutes. Which gave us time for a break.
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