I'm a prof at a community college and I'm conducting an educational research project. As part of the study, I am surveying my students.



To avoid bias, I cannot see the results of the survey until after final grades are submitted for the course. Also, the students will be given a little extra credit for completing the survey. They must sign informed consent at the beginning of the survey in order to proceed. If they choose not to participate in the study, they can complete an alternative extra credit assignment that requires about the same amount of time and effort as the survey. To further avoid bias and the potential for coercion, I cannot know who agreed to participate in the study and who elected to do the alternative assignment.



Here are my questions:

1) How do I lock myself out until a specific date?

2) How do generate a list of survey participants before grades are due?



I have a potential solution....but does anyone have suggestions? I'm a newbie, so the details could be wrong..

There is someone at my Professional Dev office on campus who provides research support (David - he does not teach). So, what if I:

1) Add David as a user for my survey and give him full permissions

2) Then, David removes most of my permissions until a certain date

3) Students submit the alternative extra credit to David directly if they do not want to participate in the study (I'll make it easy to grade and most students agree to participate if other's past experience is an indication)

4) David provides me a list of students who completed the survey AND students who completed the alternative assignment. He will NOT indicate which students are which.