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Add a questionnaire activity

The questionnaire tool is most likely to be used for, and is the recommended tool for carrying out Student Module Feedback (online module Evaluation).

You can find Step-by-step guides to setting up a Moodle questionnaire to be used for Student Module FeedbackLink opens in a new window in the SMF guides section.

The questionnaire tool allows you to construct surveys using a variety of question types, for the purpose of gathering data from users. This might be data for rating or feedback purposes, or data collection for say, ethical approval for example.

TIP: The questionnaire tool allows for non-respondents to be contacted and encouraged to carry out the questionnaire without compromising anonymity.

1. To add a feedback activity, with editing turned on, click on the 'Add an activity or resource' link in the section or topic where you want it to exist.

Add an activity or resource

2. Choose 'Questionnaire' from the list of activities and resources.

Questionnaire link

3. The 'Description' box, if you wish, could be used to display instructions, inform the student that the feedback is annoymous (if it is, for example), say how their data will be used and the time it will take etc. This will be the first thing that a student will see when they click the link to carry out the feedback activity.

Name and Description

4. Under 'Availability', if you wish to make the Questionnaire activity available between certain dates/times, click on the enable box to the right of 'from' and/or 'to' and set the date and time as required.

Availability

5. Under 'Response options', set your requirements as required.

Response options

* The following taken directly from Moodle Docs (hereLink opens in a new window)

Type: Select whether users will be allowed to respond once, daily, weekly, monthly or an unlimited number of times (many).

Respondent Type: You can display your users' full names with each response by setting this to "fullname". You can hide your users' identities from the responses by setting this to "anonymous".

Once the "anonymous" option has been set in a questionnaire, it's impossible to revert to the "fullname" option, for obvious privacy reasons. So be careful when you set your questionnaire to "anonymous".

Note: If your Moodle course allows guests, they will only be allowed to respond to a questionnaire whose responses have been set to anonymous.

Students can view ALL responses: The options are as follows: After answering the questionnaire, After the questionnaire is closed, Always, or the most likely option of Never.

Send submission notifications: Setting this to "Notification only" will notify those with manager, course leader and teacher roles in the course that a submission was made to the questionnaire. Setting this to "Full submission" will send the entire submission content to the same roles.

Save/Resume answers: Setting this option allows users to save their answers to a questionnaire before submitting them. Users can leave the questionnaire unfinished and resume from the save point at a later date.

Allow branching questions: If you wish to "branch" the respondent to different pages/questions according to their choice of response to Yes/No, Dropdown boxes or Radio button questions then change this to 'Yes'. If you do not plan to use this feature in the questionnaire, you should set it to 'No'.

Auto numbering: If you have multiple questions or pages, you can choose to split them up and number them.

Tip: You might want to disable automatic numbering for questionnaires with conditional branching.

Submission grade: Unlike the Quiz or Lesson activities the questionnaire activity is not meant to test the student's knowledge and therefore the responses cannot/should not be graded as correct or incorrect. However, in order to encourage the students to complete a questionnaire, you may choose to award the student a grade (on a 1-100 scale) upon completion.

6. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and click 'Save and display'.

Save and display

7. You can then add to questions to your questionnaire by clicking on the silver cog-wheel (right side of the screen) and choosing questions.

Questions

8. To add questions to your questionnaire, via the 'Questions' tab, click on the drop-down menu and choose the required question type from the list.

Question types

9. Once you have chosen a question type, click the 'Add selected question type' button.

Add selected question type

Question Types

---Page Break---
Use this to insert page breaks in longish questionnaires. Note that if a page contains questions with required response the respondent will not be allowed to navigate to the next page unless those required responses have been given.


Check Boxes
Check boxes allow the user to select multiple answers from a list of options.

Date

Use this question type if you expect the response to be a correctly formatted date.

The information on this page relates to Moodle v3.4 and was last updated August 2018.

Dropdown Box
There is no real advantage to using the Dropdown Box over using the Radio Buttons except perhaps for longish lists of options, to save screen space.


Essay Box
This question will display a plain text box with x Textarea columns (or area width) and y Textarea rows (number of text lines).

Label
This is not a question but a (short) text which can be displayed to introduce a series of questions, or perhaps give instructions.

Numeric
Use this question type if you expect the response to be a correctly formatted number. By using the Max. digits allowed and Nb of decimal digits parameters you can specify the length and number of decimal places required.

Radio Buttons

Set of choices using radio buttons in which the user can select one answer, which can be 'other' with a text-fill box.

Rate (scale 1..5)

Use this question if you want items to be rated on a scale, which can either be numerical, or labels such as 'Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree'.

Text Box
For the Text Box question type, enter the Input Box length and the Maximum text length of text to be entered by respondent. Default values are 20 characters for the Input Box width and 25 characters for the maximum length of text entered.

Yes/No

No explanation needed.

If you get stuck on setting up any of the question types, please email moodle at warwick dot ac dot uk

10. Once you have built your questionnaire, you can see what it will look like to the respondents by clicking on the 'Preview' tab.

Preview

11. Once users have given respsonses, if you click on the questionnaire from your Moodle course page, you will see a ''View All Responses' link which willprovide you with an overview report of responses.

View all responses

This includes, graphical representation of the total number of responses and the option to export the raw data to Excel in order to carry out more thorough reporting if required.

Overview of responses

From this page, you can also contact non-respondents, download the raw data file, and see how many respones made to the questionnaire.

Export and contact non-respondents

Contacting non-respondents

The questionnaire tool allows those with editing rights to e-mail non-respondents (without compromising anonymity, if set to anonymous mode). You can use this to encourage non-respondents to complete the questionnaire, particularly if you are not asking students to do it in class.

Click the 'Non-respondents' tab, select to Send message to 'All' then type a subject line and the required message before clicking the send button at the bottom of the page.

Contact non-respondents

Download in text format

Guidance on how to do this, and transfer the data to Excel is available, hereLink opens in a new window.

For more guidance on the questionnaire, please see:


The information on this page relates to Moodle v3.4 and was last updated October 2018.

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