Department of Psychology
Online Participant Pool Management System
Participant Information
This document contains information on the following:
1. Registering with the system
a. Changing your profile information
2. Logging on to the system
3. Setting your weekly availability schedule
4. Searching for experiments
5. Signing up for experiments
6. Keeping track of your experiments
7. Canceling an experiment
8. Penalties
1. Registering with the system
Registering is the first step in using the system.
To register: Go to the login page and click the link at the bottom of the page that reads
"Click here to register". When you reach the registration page, you are presented with the
fields needed for registration.
You must register as a “Participant”.
The calendar icon can be clicked to open a calendar for date of birth selection. The
Username, Password, Confirm Password, User Type, Student ID, First Name, Last Name,
Email, Phone number, Date of Birth, Class and Section fields are required. In order to
ensure that you are properly credited for your research participation at the end of the
semester, it is vital that you register with your correct Class and Section number.
The Gender, Ethnicity, Student Status and Relationship Status fields are not required, but
it is recommended that these fields are filled in. They are used for showing experiments
that are appropriate for you. If the demographic information is not submitted, you will
not be shown experiments with demographic restrictions.
Input for each field is required to be in the proper format:
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Username: May only contain letters and numbers.
Password: Must be 8 or more characters in length
Confirm Password: Must match the "New Password" field
Student ID (your 800 number): May only contain numbers and must be nine
digits in length
First Name: May only contain letters
Last Name: May only contain letters
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Email: Must be in the form name@whatever.com
Phone number: May only contain numbers and must be in the form ###-#######
Date of Birth: May only contain numbers and must be in the form mm/dd/yyyy
Once the required fields are filled in, click the "Submit" button to complete registration,
or click the "Cancel" button to cancel registration.
1a. Changing your profile information
After registering with the system, you may want to modify your profile information.
To modify your profile: Go to your Profile page. Any information on the User Profile
page can be modified with the exception of the "Username" and "User Type" fields. The
calendar icon can be clicked to open a calendar for date of birth selection. The Student
ID, First Name, Last Name, Email, Phone number, Class, Section and Date of Birth fields
are required. The Gender, Ethnicity, Student Status and Relationship Status fields are not
required, but it is recommended that these fields are filled in. They are used for showing
experiments that are appropriate for you. If the demographic information is not
submitted, you will not be shown experiments with demographic restrictions.
Input for each field is required to be in the proper format:






Student ID (your 800 number): May only contain numbers and must be nine
digits in length
First Name: May only contain letters
Last Name: May only contain letters
Email: Must be in the form name@whatever.com
Phone number: May only contain numbers and must be in the form ###-#######
Date of Birth: May only contain numbers and must be in the form mm/dd/yyyy
When profile modification is complete click the "Submit" button to save the changes, or
click the "Cancel" button to disregard changes.
2. Logging on to the system
Logging in to the system is required before the system itself can be used. Prior to logging
in you must first register with the system.
To log in: First go to the login page. When you reach the login page, fill in both the
"Username" and "Password" fields with your username and password. When this
information has been entered, click the "Login" button to complete the login process and
begin using the system.
3. Setting your weekly availability schedule
The weekly availability schedule manager provides you a way to specify what times in
a normal week you will generally be available to take part in an experiment. It consists
of seven columns (representing the seven days of the week) and a number of rows
(representing different times of the day). The schedule represents a normal week, and not
any specific week in particular.
To setup your weekly availability, simply click on the "Weekly Availability Schedule"
link in the main menu. Then in the resulting page click on a time block to toggle it
between times you are available (checked/green) and times you will not be available
(unchecked/red). Scroll to the bottom of the page and click submit to save your changes.
If you want to override the normal timeframe, simply select the start and end times at the
bottom of the page and click submit. All changes you make to your schedule will be
saved and the page will reload with the new starting and ending at the times you
specified.
Note: The availability schedule is by default completely unavailable, so if you do not set
up a schedule and you tell the experiment search to only show results compatible with
your schedule (the default behavior), then no experiments will be shown.
4. Searching for experiments
Each experiment can have zero or more sessions scheduled for it. The Search
Experiments section shows experiments with sessions matching user-specified criteria
and provides the user with the option to sign up for one. The user interface provides the
following options:
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From: Only show experiments with sessions after this date-time. NOTE: This
field defaults to now. Also, you cannot specify a date and time earlier than the
current date and time.
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To: Only show experiments with sessions before this date-time. NOTE: This field
defaults to 30 days after the current date-time.
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Credits: Only show experiments with the specified number of credits. Default is
any.
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Keywords: Only show experiments matching *all* of these keywords in the
experiment's name, abstract, or description. NOTE: If you want to search for an
exact phrase, enter a phrase and surround in it quotes, e.g., enter "personality and
occupation" WITH the quotes.
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Compatible with schedule: If checked, only show experiments with sessions that
are compatible with your availability schedule.
Below is a picture showing some of the main interface elements:
5. Signing up for experiments
To search for an experiment, use the Search Experiments page. Once you find an
experiment of interest, you may click on its Sign Up link. This will take you to the
session view page. If the search results for that experiment have sessions that fall on
multiple days, you will see a monthly session view for that experiment. If the sessions
all fall on one day, you will get a daily session view. Either way, find a session that you
wish to sign up for, and click on the Sign Up link for that session. You are now signed
up for that session. Note that you can see which sessions you are signed up for by
clicking on the My Experiments link on the left-hand menu.
The monthly schedule view shows you all of your sessions in a familiar calendar format.
Any day that has sessions that you have signed up for will show up in the calendar with a
link telling you the number of sessions that you have signed up for on that day. Clicking
on this link will take you to the daily schedule view for that day.
6. Keeping track of your experiments
The My Experiments section shows a list of all experiment sessions that you have signed
up for that have not been canceled. This page will display the date, time, location, your
current participation status, and the credit worth for all of your sessions, as well as
provide a link to the information about the experiment and the experimenter who will be
conducting the experiment.
From here you can also cancel sessions if it is more than 24 hours before the scheduled
start of the experiment. Simply click on the 'cancel' link and the 'cancel this session'
button in the following confirmation page.
7. Canceling an experiment
If you find that you have signed up for an experiment, but for whatever reason you will
not be able to attend, then you can cancel your participation in the session, assuming
there are at least 24 hours before the session is supposed to start. To do this, simply go to
"My Experiments". Look for the session you wish to cancel and click on the "cancel"
link in the status column.
Note: If the session has expired, or it is less than 24 hours before the session will start, the
"cancel" link will not show up and you will not be able to cancel your participation in the
session. In these cases you will have to contact the experimenter responsible for that
session and request they cancel the session for you. (If you click on the name of the
experimenter you will be provided with their user profile which should include their
email address and phone number).
8. Penalties
It is very important that students honor their study appointments throughout the semester.
Students who fail to cancel their participation or fail to show up for a scheduled session
will be penalized. Under “My Experiments”, scheduled sessions which students fail to
attend will be notated as “Pending confirmation”. Essentially, this will prevent you from
signing up for that study again later during the semester, thereby decreasing the overall
number of studies in which you can participate. The more studies you fail to attend, the
fewer studies you will be able to earn research credit for, and the greater the likelihood
that you will need to write article summaries to fulfill your research requirement (as
described in your syllabus).
Note: Immediately after a study session has ended, all sessions are notated as “Pending
confirmation” until the Experimenter has the opportunity to log on to the website to
award credit to those students who participated in that session. As such, if you
participated in a session and it appears as “Pending confirmation”, you will eventually be
given credit for that session (although it may take a day or two). If you fail to attend a
scheduled session, however, that session will remain in “Pending confirmation” status for
the rest of the semester, and you will not be able to sign back up for it to receive credit at
a later date. [This is a software programming issue that will be resolved next semester.]