Moodle has two tools specifically designed for collecting ungraded feedback from your students: surveys and choices.
A survey is a set of predetermined questions. It’s not yet possible to create your own questions in a survey unless you install a nonstandard module such as Questionnaire or Feedback. The current survey focuses on getting feedback from students about the nature of the course.
Choices are small, one-question surveys. They act as small web polls that you may have seen on other web sites. You can use a choice to get rapid feedback from your students about any topic you wish, as long as it’s only one question long.
This section covers the following MTC skills: 5.6 Survey
There are three types of surveys you can give:
- COLLES (Constructivist On-Line Learning Environment Survey)
This is a set of 24 statements that asks students about the relevance of the course, provides opportunities for reflection and interactivity, provides peer and tutor support, and facilitates interpretation. These factors are based on social constructivist theory, as discussed in Chapter 1. Variations on the survey ask students to discuss their preferred learning environment or the actual learning environment. Moodle offers three types of COLLES surveys: preferred, actual, or a combination of the two. The preferred COLLES survey asks students to discuss how they think they want to interact with a course, while the actual COLLES survey asks them how they are interacting currently.
- ATTLS (Attitudes to Thinking and Learning Survey)
ATTLS seeks to measure the quality of interaction within a course. It builds on the “Separate and Connected ways of knowing” scale, which we discussed in Chapter 13.
- Critical Incidents
The Critical Incidents survey asks students to consider recent events and answer questions about their relationship to those events.
The limited nature of the surveys tool makes surveys very easy to create. Basically, you select the set of prewritten questions you’d like to give, edit the introductory text, and you’re done.
To create a survey:
Select Survey from the “Add an activity” drop-down menu in the course section where you would like to add the survey.
On the “Adding a new survey page,” as shown in Figure 14-1, give the survey a name.
Select the type of survey you want to give from the drop-down menu.
If you wish, add an introduction to the survey.
Select the common module options:
- Group mode
This is another location in which to set the group mode for the activity. If group mode is forced in the course settings then this setting will be ignored.
- Visible
This determines whether students may view the activity or not.
Click the “Save changes” button.
The following page displays the question set you have chosen. Click the “Check and continue” button at the bottom of the page.
Once you’ve created the survey, students can begin to give their feedback. They simply click on the survey name in the course section and answer the questions. Once students have begun to answer the survey questions, you can track results via the “View xx survey responses” link at the top right of the survey page.
The survey report page contains links at the top right for viewing the data by course, by student, or by question. You can also download the data in a choice of three formats: Open Document Spreadsheet, Excel, or text.
Warning
Moodle surveys are not anonymous. While students cannot see each other’s results, you can view each student’s survey. There is no way to ensure anonymity. If you are using these results for research, you must develop a scheme to download the data and assign participant numbers. You should also inform students of this limitation.
The COLLES and ATTLS questions are five-point scales that range in response from “Almost always” to “Almost never” for COLLES and from “Strongly agree” to “Strongly disagree” for ATTLS. These results are reported in graphical form when you view them, as illustrated in Figure 14-2.
The Critical Incidents survey is a free-response survey where students must type their answers. You can see what students have typed for each answer. Later in this chapter, we’ll discuss how to apply the data you gather.
The survey module has three capabilities:
- Respond to survey
This allows a user to participate in a survey.
- View responses
This allows a user to read survey responses via the “View xx survey responses” link at the top right of the survey page.
- Download responses
This allows a user to download survey responses.