Qualtrics is UBC’s survey platform. I’m mostly happy to just use anonymous links in it, and when I’m not, I can often distribute targeted links via e-mail addresses.

However, as instructors, we do not have access to a list of our students’ e-mail addresses in our classes. So, how do we send a survey to students in a course where we want to know who responded, with some confidence?

It turns out we can have students log in to Qualtrics via CWL.

They key is to create an authenticator. I figured this out with help from the documentation and from published tips from Firas Moosvi. (Thanks, Firas!)

The key is to open the “survey flow”:

Then add an “Authenticator” block. I’m not sure whether it matters where you put the block, but since it seems to behave like a conditional, I placed my authentication-guarded survey questions in the block nested beneath the authenticator. Finally, configure the authenticator to use “SSO” and “Shibboleth” and likely to “Capture respondent identifying info”:

Be sure to click “Apply” on this screen and then go to the main survey screen (the clipboard icon above) and click “Publish” or you will not see the updates.

Above, I am capturing given name and surname (but not preferred name, which is unavailable) as well as email. I am also capturing a unique identifier exported by UBC, but which cannot be mapped back to CWL.

Note that what I wrote above does not capture CWL login or student number. According to this document listing attributes you can use, it is possible to capture these via shibboleth. Unfortunately, according to Warren Code:

From Joss Ives, Qualtrics expert in PHAS: The only fields I have been able to capture are “lastName”, “sn” (which is the same as lastName) “givenName”, “email” (email) and “ubcEduPersistentID” (which does not seem to correspond to any identifier on any other system) So it’s enough to uniquely identify somebody in a smaller class

LT Hub confirmed roughly the same set of fields.

So, that’s what we have to work with! I suspect the email is whichever one the student registers with the student registration system as their preferred email, as opposed to (for example) the CWL@student.ubc.ca e-mail address.