The experimenter area is accessible via the subdirectory /admin. If you are not logged in yet, you will be asked to enter your username and password. Note that case matters for username and password.
After logging in, you arrive at the welcome screen of the experimenter view. From there you can jump to the different functions described below. Your current location is highlighted in the navigation bar. In the following we will explain the main functions of the system by providing a short tutorial on how to organize a typical laboratory experiment.
Creating an experiment
To register a new experiment choose Create new from the experiment section in the navigation bar or from the experiment overview page. You carefully have to fill in the fields which are explained below.
Name: State the internal (meaningful) name of the experiment. This name will only be used on the internal pages and is therefore not accessible by possible participants. Choose a descriptive name so that you can later quickly find and identify your experiment.
Public name: State the name under which this experiment should be advertised publicly (i.e. to participants). You should choose a generic, abstract name, which nevertheless allows for non-ambiguous identification, foe example Experiment 2015-24. This public name can be hidden in the public calendar, if wanted, see section General settings for details.
Description: Shortly describe your experiment. This is for internal laboratory use only.
Public experiment note: This field will only appear if the respective feature is enabled in Options/General settings. The text entered here will appear on the participant's enrolment page, just below the experiment name. So you can add additional instructions that apply to your experiment. (There is also an option to add a note to each session, see Creating sessions.).
Type: ORSEE distinguishs between external and internal experiment types. They can be configured in the 'Options' section (see Experiment types). In the selection list, the first name is the internal experiment type (i.e the way the experiment is organized in ORSEE), while the name in parentheses is external type (which is the experiment type to subjects subscribed to). Currently, ORSEE only properly implements the internal type of laboratory experiments, while online-surveys and internet experiments are placeholders and will be fully featured in later versions.
Class: Experiment classes are like “tags” which you can assign to your experiments. Examples are “dictator game”, “public goods game”, “individual decision-making”, or “uses cognitive reflection test”. Classes can be added/edited in the options section (see section Experiment classes). You can add as many classes as you like to an experiment. Classes can be searched on in participant search or when assigning subjects to an experiment. This allows you to exclude subjects who have participated in a certain type of experiment, for example (assuming that proper class data had ben entered for previous experiments).
Experimenter: Select the experimenters involved in the experiment. For the chosen experimenters, the experiment will appear in the My Experiments list.
Experiment access restricted?: This checkbox will only show up if the respective feature had been enabled in General settings. If you check this box, then only experimenters assigned to this experiment (or with overriding user privileges) will be able to access the experiment's pages and options.
Get emails: Select the experimenters who should receive messages from the system about this experiment and its sessions.
E-mail sender address: If this feature is enabled in General settings, you may change here the email address that will be the sender of all e-mails from the system to the assigned/invited/registered participants of this experiment.
Human Subjects Ethics Approval: If the respective ethics module is enabled in Options/General settings, then you may enter the details of the human subjects approval of this experiment here (i.e. the authority/committee, an approval number, and whether the application is exempt (=indefinitely valid) or the approval has an expiration date). When an expiration date is set here and sessions are created with a date later than the expiration date, a prominent note will appear on the experiment main page.
Related budgets and Possible payment types: If the respective payment tracking module is enabled in Options/General settings, then you can add the payment types allowed for this experiment (see also Payment types ), and the budgets to which payments will be charged ((see also Budgets). If you choose only one payment type, it will be assumed that this is the only payment type available for all sessions. Similarly, if you choose only one budget here, then it will be assumed that all payments of the experiment will be charged to that budget.
Experiment completed?: When setting up the experiment you leave this box unchecked. Once you completed your experiment you can check this box, the experiment will then be moved from the Current experiments list to the Completed experiments list.
Hide in participants statistics?: If you want this experiment to be ignored when calculating no-show-up numbers for participants statistics, then check this box. (This may be useful when you add data from old experiments which you conducted before you started with ORSEE and its recruitment system.)
Hide in public calendar?: Normally, all laboratory experiment sessions will be listed in the public calendar. But sometimes you don't want to show the sessions of a particular experiment, e.g. when you invite two distinct subgroups at the same time. If you check this box, the sessions of this experiment will be hidden.
Link to Paper: When finished with the paper, you can provide the full URL to your paper here for documentation purposes.
After filling in the fields as described above, click on “add”. The page returns with the message Changes saved. If you now click on Experiments - Overview, you will see your just created experiment listed. You can access this experiment for further changes by clicking on its name.
For laboratory experiments the experiment's main page consists of three parts: first, the basic settings as entered above is listed. By clicking on Edit basic settings you jump to a form similar to the one you used to create the experiment, where you can make changes. If you click on Upload file, you can upload files like instructions, programs, data files etc., and assign them to sessions if needed (see also Files).
The second part lists the sessions of the experiment with some additional information. The last part is dedicated to the subjects of your experiment: here you can administer their assignment and invitations.