U of M Reconciliation – Canadian Reconciliation Barometer
Project Term: Fall 2019
The Reconciliation team at the University of Manitoba needed a way to gather information about Canadian perspectives on reconciliation with Canada’s indigenous people and compare changes in Canadians’ thoughts and feelings over time. The Reconciliation team worked with the ACE Project Space to build a solution that facilitates building a longitudinal study on Canadian perspectives.
Enabling longitudinal studies of Canadian perspectives on reconciliation
Several organizations are conducting research on the state of social conditions related to Canada’s reconciliation, but none have been doing so with long-term tracking. The client, the U of M Reconciliation team, explained that long-term tracking is both difficult and expensive and was a major challenge in completing their research. The client also expressed great concern regarding any potential for breach of data security and wanted to protect the integrity of the data captured.
The ACE Project Space team assigned to the project created a custom survey distribution system, leveraging a third-party API, and self-enrollment form through a new website. Users can submit their email address and receive a survey link at the address provided. After the user completes the survey, their contact information is added to a list, to be contacted annually until the survey’s term expires. To address the concerns about data security, the students leveraged the storage and security built by Google and Qualtrics. The students maintained data integrity by permitting only a single email address to have access to an instance of the longitudinal study.
Deliverables
For the fall term at the ACE Project Space, our students created the following deliverables:
- Canadian Reconciliation Barometer website:
- Landing page
- Survey page
- Education & Learning page
- Related sites page
- Team bios page
- Qualtrics Bridge Survey Distribution and Tracking plugin for WordPress
What our students are saying
“While working on this project, I learned about the history of Canada and about Reconciliation. I researched on different existing websites related to reconciliation. We used WordPress software to build this website and I learned the functionality and features of this software, also how to work with WordPress plugins and themes. I also studied the features of Qualtrics software that how can you create and publish survey on that.
In this project, I polished my presentation skills and learned soft skills while working within a team. I have also developed communication skills and professionalism from meetings we had with customers or instructors and got real world experienced.” – Anmoldeep Dhaliwal
“Through the course of the Industry Project, I learned valuable lessons about teamwork, a different culture than mine, and, of course, technology.
I collaborated with my team to schedule stages of project development, and to cooperate in tasks requiring collective action. They assisted me in producing documentation, and I added the technical details. The lesson I take from this that delegation and division of responsibilities will produce valuable results.
I designed and developed an innovative solution to a business problem without a clear answer. This project was an example of the power of integrations, and of leveraging existing technologies to serve new purposes and to meet unique demands. The lesson here is that knowledge of available technologies is key, as well as a fundamental knowledge of how to work with said technologies to achieve something unique. The realm between what tech exists, and what potential it has to make something new, is the developer’s frontier.” – Raymond Weiss
Technologies used
- WordPress
- React
- Qualtrics
- Git
- Balsamiq
- Bizagi Modeler