The SUMI Questionnaire for Academic Usage
The SUMI Questionnaire for Academic Usage
I offer special terms for universities and institutions wishing to use SUMI. I encourage students and teachers to use SUMI for teaching and learning purposes.
If you are a student, you may apply to use SUMI on a student project. This must be a bona fide student project, however, resulting in a written report solely for academic purposes.
Three things you should do:
Please remember that having a SUMI evaluation done for nothing is a gift I choose to award to a young colleague, it is not a right for you to have!
Although you will be able to publish your findings, under no circumstance may your SUMI results be wholly or partly sold to a client.
I require a letter (which you may scan and e-mail to me) from your tutor, supervisor, or head of department on headed notepaper (a simple e-mail will not do) with something like the following text:
[Name] is a student at [name and address of department] and I guarantee that [his or her] usage of SUMI is solely for research purposes, and forms part of [his or her] research leading to [name of degree or certification for which the work is intended]. I guarantee that the student is not working in a consultancy relationship with any commercial interest as far as their use of SUMI is concerned, and that I will help the student to take reasonable steps to protect the intellectual property rights and copyright of SUMI.
[Name and position in the department]
[Signature and date]
Terms and conditions for student licence:
If you are a tutor or lecturer, you may also apply to use SUMI for genuine class exercises that are solely for teaching purposes. Please send me an email introducing yourself, the courses you teach, and outlining your proposed usage of SUMI.
Please note that if you just want to demonstrate SUMI then use the information on these pages -- together with your own inimitable commentary!
Some of my colleagues at other Universities break up large classes into small groups of five to six students, and give each small group a project to evaluate. One of the students in the group becomes the team leader whose task it is to contact me and obtain a student licence from me, and the request a report when data has been collected. If you think this will be a useful exercise for your class, then you should send me a list of names on your standard headed paper of the team leaders and this will suffice for the letter from the supervisor. Colleagues have commented that the experience is a good growth point for students.
Just using SUMI without the scoring procedure and student licence is not a good learning experience: it teaches students to disrespect copyrights and permissions and it fails to distinguish between SUMI and any other old unsupported 'usability questionnaire' of which there are literally hundreds.
I'm Jurek Kirakowski, and my email address for all correspondence to do with SUMI is jzk@uxp.ie .