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. These activities are NOT meant to be used for student assessment.
This article will give an overview of these activities. For in-depth information, click on the Moodle Docs link at the bottom of each activity's tab.
Add Survey, Feedback, Questionnaire, and Choice activities in the CLE
- Navigate to the CLE course page on the top right corner, and turn Edit mode 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 - Survey, Feedback, Questionnaire, or Choice. This will take you to the settings page for the corresponding activity.
4. Configure the settings as needed and click Save and return to course or Save and display.
Survey Activity
The Survey activity offers different survey types that 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 not anonymous – instructors can see how individual students respond.
Survey types:
- 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.
- COLLES - Constructivist On-Line Learning Environment Survey used to measure students’ online learning experience in different aspects: relevance, reflective thinking, interactivity, teacher support, peer support, and communication.
- ATTLS - Attitudes to Thinking and Learning Survey used to measure whether students are more objective, logical learners or more empathetic, flexible learners.
Questionnaire Activity
Allows instructors to create a wide range of questions to get student feedback on a CLE course. Instructors may choose to make questions required or allow students to skip certain questions.
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 question types can be added to a questionnaire, including checkboxes, dropdown options, essays, scales, yes/no, and more.
Questionnaire settings:
- Availability - Select when students can 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 button 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 grade book to encourage student participation.
Feedback Activity
The Feedback activity allows you to create and conduct surveys to collect feedback. Unlike the Survey tool it allows you to write your own questions, rather than choose from a list of pre-written questions and unlike the Quiz tool, you can create non-graded questions. The Feedback activity is ideal for course or teacher evaluations. The Feedback activity is very similar to the questionnaire activity; instructors can create surveys to collect feedback from students. 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.
Choice Activity
The Choice activity is ideal for asking one question that students can answer from a choice of several customizable options. 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.