The Survey, Feedback, Questionnaire, and Choice activities in the CLE are useful ways to gather data from students. Depending on the activity, instructors can choose to use pre-determined questions or create their own questions to collect information from students that can help them learn more about and improve their teaching practice.
This article will give an overview of these activities to enable instructors to choose which activity is best suited for their course. For in-depth information, click on the Moodle Docs link at the bottom of each activity's tab.
Add any of these activities to a CLE course through the activity and resource picker:
- Go to the CLE course page, from the Gear icon at the top-right click Turn editing on.
- In the section where you would like the file to be added, click Add an activity or resource.
- In the window that appears, select one of the activities - Choice, Feedback, Questionnaire, or Feedback.
- Configure settings as needed and click Save and return to course or Save and display.
The Survey activity offers a number of verified survey instruments, including COLLES (Constructivist On-Line Learning Environment Survey) and ATTLS (Attitudes to Thinking and Learning Survey), which have been found useful in assessing and stimulating learning in online environments.
Surveys are not customizable. Once you select the survey framework, the questions are automatically populated. Surveys are also not anonymous – instructors are able to see how individual students respond.
Survey types:
- ATTL: used to measure whether students are more objective, logical learners or more empathetic, flexible learners.
- COLLES: used to measure students’ online learning experience in different aspects: relevance, reflective thinking, interactivity, teacher support, peer support, and communication.
- Critical incidents survey: used to evaluate students’ most impactful moments, including when students were most engaged, when they were most distanced, when they felt most affirmed or helped, when they were most confused, and when they were most surprised.
Questionnaires are private by default, so they only appear in the CLE course where they are created. They can be set to public, so that they are shared among courses and have one place to collect responses. They can also be created as templates, to allow others to copy the survey questions to use in a different course.
Various different question types can be added to a questionnaire, including check boxes, dropdown options, essays, scales, yes/no, and more.
Questionnaire settings
- Availability - Select when students are able to access and respond to the survey
- Response options
- Type – select whether students will be able to respond once, daily, weekly, monthly, or an unlimited number of times (many).
- Respondent Type – Display students’ full names with each response by setting this to "fullname", or hide identities from the responses by setting this to "anonymous".
- Students can view ALL responses – Determine whether students can see others’ responses, and if so, when.
- Send submission notifications – Notifies certain roles when answers are submitted. We recommend that this is left to the default setting of No.
- Save/Resume answers – Setting this option allows students to save their answers before submitting the questionnaire. They can resume the questionnaire at a later date.
- Allow branching questions – Enable yes/no and radio buttons questions to have child questions dependent on the answers.
- Auto numbering – Enable automated numbering of questions. If branching questions are enabled, this should be set to no.
- Submission grade – Though this activity is not meant to be a knowledge assessment, this activity can still be worth points in the gradebook to encourage student participation.
The Feedback activity is ideal for optional course or teacher evaluations. Responses can be anonymous, so no identifying data is collected.
Question and submission settings
- Record user names – Responses can be anonymous or recorded along with students’ names
- Allow multiple submissions – Restrict students to one submission or allow unlimited responses
- Enable notification of submissions – Enable this for instructors to receive notification of submissions
- Auto number questions – Enables and disables automated numbers for each question
Once a questionnaire is completed by a student, instructors can choose to show feedback results or not. Instructors can also customize students' next step by linking to an activity.
After submission settings
- Show analysis page – Select yes to allow students who submit feedback to see everyone’s responses
- Completion message – Customize a message to display to students after submitting feedback
- Link to next activity – If left blank, the feedback activity will redirect to the main course page. Add a URL here to select a specific location to send survey respondents.
Question types that can be added to a feedback activity:
- Captcha (not recommended)
- Information – this pulls course or category information directly from the CLE.
- Long or short text answer – allows open text responses
- Numeric questions – allows responses on a customizable scale
- Multiple choice questions - standard question with a few options for students to choose from
Labels and page breaks can also be added to a feedback activity to better organize the questions.
Instructors can allow students to update their choice after making an initial selection, or select more than one option. Instructors can also limit the number of responses allowed.
Choice Settings:
