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DLHE 2015/16: Coding manual

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DLHE online survey platform


For the 2015/16 DLHE collection the online survey platform will be supplied through the newly replatformed Bristol Online Surveys (BOS), as previously communicated in circular 14/03 and circular 15/02. The BOS platform will offer graduates completing the DLHE survey online a much more user-friendly experience and offers the potential to improve the functionality of the online survey in the future.

HESA staff have been working collaboratively with the team at BOS in order to develop and test the DLHE survey on the BOS system. As previously communicated, we have been working to achieve the same validation and output specifications as in previous years.

Output file specification

During development and testing we have discovered that it will not be possible to retain precisely the same output file format as in previous years. Therefore, we are announcing today that the online DLHE file layout will change in the move from the HESA in-house online survey system to BOS.

In order to give HEPs and software houses sufficient notice to make any required changes, the revised online DLHE file layout will be published at the end of November.

To give an early indication of the likely scale of these changes to the output file specification, these are expected to impact the following areas:
  •  The order in which fields appear (e.g. timestamp)
  • Alteration to data keyed (e.g. capitalisation of postcodes)
  • Unanswered questions defaulting to a valid entry (e.g. HE experience questions)

File formats

As communicated in the September 2015 circular, HESA will be offering two file formats for exporting the data as in previous years – a comma separated value file and a tab-separated value file. We are currently discussing the provision of a fixed-length file and will confirm this shortly. An XML file will no longer be available.

Downloads of complete and partial data will be made available as separate downloads.

User accounts

Survey administration for HE providers will take place within the BOS tool. This means that the HESA-supplied administration interface will be decommissioned.

We will be publishing guidance for survey administration using the online tool, shortly.

We anticipate collecting some survey set-up information using a questionnaire to DLHE record contacts in January.

Contact Liaison by email or on +44 (0)1242 388 531.