What is the best way to design a paper questionnaire to support scanning and converting to raw data?
I can offer some help with scanning paper questionnaires as this is something I've done in a previous job. But, first, I would suggest it's quite involved so you may want to at least revisit improving your 'digital' response rate first.

Audience response devices

One option may be to allow the students to use 'clickers' to respond to questions. I would recommend having no more than 10 questions that can be answered on a multiple choice or Likert scale, which fits your requirements. Our department use something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_response
We've found that about 10 questions can be answered in about 10 minutes.

Re-consider your online/digital surveys

If clickers aren't suitable - for example because the students are not physically situated together - you could consider reviewing your digital survey, purely because it's significantly easier to obtain data from responses. To improve response rates, I tried to follow these rules of thumb:


No matrices, ever.
No more than three questions per page.
No more than six pages.


Obviously this is going to vary depending on how much detail you need, but these reminded me to keep the questions light.

Scanning paper surveys

So, with all that in mind if you still need the paper copy route, here goes. To make it worthwhile you need:


a scanner designed for automatic throughput. That is, a single sheet personal/small office scanner is not going to speed things up for you if you have to manually change ~200 sheets. Something like this Fujitsu ScanSnap might do the trick.
Software that recognises marks. I used Eyes and Hands, which is deprecated and has been superceded by ReadSoft as far as I can tell. ReadSoft can recommend a compatible scanner.
There are some requirements about how you set your paper questionnaire up, and this needs to be precise. Therefore I recommend something like QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign.
You need four recognition marks for each page, one for each corner. I often found a character from the header or text ok for the left hand side, but on the right hand side if text wasn't justified I needed to manually add some marks.
You need to lay our tick or text boxes quite clearly. For example, it's quite common to see tables without any padding used for response boxes on paper surveys but you need a gap between them for the scanning software to recognise them unambiguously.


With these basic requirements you can set up a survey to be automatically scanned and entered in to a spreadsheet or database.

Clearly this is quite involved so you may be able to find a company who can do this for your commercially. Some market research or survey companies might be able to do the heavy lifting for you.