The Illinois Tech Department of Psychology pays for a subscription to use a cloud-based research participant management software called Sona ($1,400/year): https://www.sona-systems.com/default.aspx. Sona software is used by over 1,000 colleges and universities in the U.S., and is the dominant service provider for academic research. A local Chicago design firm, Gravity Tank, has developed an alternative, cloud platform that is exclusively geared toward virtual research participation for market/consumer behavior research, called dscout: https://dscout.com/research.
The problem facing our Department of Psychology is that Sona and dscout are relatively expensive and not ideally suited for the kinds of research our students and faculty are most commonly (and increasingly) doing. The majority of psychology research studies done at Illinois Tech involve data collection using either online surveys, smartphone apps, or other technologies.
The challenge for the IPRO team is to research, plan and develop a cloud based research participant management software that will achieve the following:
The IPRO project involves the following sequence of activities, over more than one semester: