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Moodle - Faculty QuickStart Guide: Questionnaire

This faculty quickstart guide for getting started with Moodle includes information about course settings, adding resources, setting up and conducting activities, and user profiles.

Moodle - Questionnaire

The questionnaire module in Moodle allows you to create a survey or questionnaire for students to fill out, for instance a course evaluation or a reading response survey.  You may choose whether or not the responses are anonymous.

Creating a Questionnaire:

    • Turn Editing On in your course
    • Pick a section in your course that you would like the Questionnaire to reside,then in the 'Add an activity...' select Questionnaire.
     


    You will see the Editing Questionnaire page. Give the Questionnaire a Name and a Summary, then scroll down.

     

    If needed, you may set an Open Date and a Close Date for your Questionnaire.

     



Scroll down and you will reach the Response options. 

Here are the descriptions for each option:

Type

  • Respond many (default) - Allows each user to respond multiple times
  • Respond once - Allows each user to only respond once to the Questionnaire
  • Respond daily - Allows one response from each user each day
  • Respond weekly - Allows one response from each user each week
  • Respond monthly - Allows one response from each user each month
        Respondent Type
 
  • fullname (default) - Records the user's full name with their submitted Questionnaire
  • anonymous - Does not record the user's full name with their submitted Questionnaire
        Students can view ALL responses  
  • Never (default) - Only teachers of the owning course can see all questionnaire submitted responses
  • After answering the questionnaire - This allows students to see all responses after answering a questionnaire that is set to respond once only. If a questionnaire is set to respond more than once, then students cannot see all responses unless you use one of the next two options.
  • After the questionnaire is closed - Students can view responses only after the questionnaire is closed.
  • Always - Students always see responses.
Save/Resume Answers (default: No)

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.

Submission grade

Allows you to set a grade for the Questionnaire.
 

Now scroll down and look for the Content Options section. Here, you may define whether you want to create a new list of questions or use some existing ones.

 


 

Scroll down and click:



You will see a page with 4 tabs at the top, View, Advanced settings, Questions, and Preview.

 

Click the Questions tab.

You will see an interface that allows you begin adding questions to your Questionnaire.

 

From the drop-down list, select the type of question you would like to add first.

In this example, I will select 'Check Boxes' and click 'Add selected question type'.

You will see an interface to add the 'Check Boxes' question.

 

 
  • Enter the Question Name
  • Select the Response Required option - If you select No, participants do not have to answer this question
  • The Min. forced responses and Max. forced responses options let you control limits on the number of check marks required
  • Enter the Question Text
  • Enter the Possible answers - be sure to seperate each possible answer with a line break
  • Click either 'Save changes' or 'Save as New Question' - If you select 'Save as New Question and you are editing an existing question, it will create a copy of the question.
Return to the Questions tab and you will see your new question listed.

 

 

If you would like to see what your Questionnaire will look like, click the 'Preview' tab.

 

 

You can continue to add more questions to your Questionnaire by clicking the Question tab. The available question types are:
 
  1. ---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.

  2. Check Boxes Allows multiple responses to one question, including an optional Other blank.  You can specify a minimum and maximum number of responses, but please make note of that in the question text as well.

  3. Date Use this question type if you expect the response to be a correctly formatted date. The format will depend upon the language currently being used by the questionnaire respondent. For example 4/21/2007 (US); 21/4/2007 (UK); 21-4-2007 (France); etc. An example will be displayed in the questionnaire. If an "impossible" or wrongly formatted date is entered, it will either be re-written or reformatted correctly (if possible) or an error message will be displayed to the respondent. In order for dates to be correctly exported to spreadsheets such as Excel, respondent must enter a date in the 1902 to 2037 range. If a date outside this range is expected from respondents, then use the Text Box question type instead. The date question type will accept dates consisting only of a month plus a year (e.g. 12/2008 for December 2008) or only a year (e.g. 2008). However, for spreadsheet processing compatibility, such incomplete dates will be automatically transformed to complete dd/mm/yy dates, e.g. 12/2008 -> 01/12/2008 and 2008 -> 01/01/2008. You may have to explain this peculiarity to your questionnaire users beforehand.

  4. 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.

  5. Essay Box Settings are available for enabling or disabling the HTML editor and for setting the height and width of the plain textarea box.

  6. Label This is not a question but (short) text which will be displayed to introduce a series of questions

  7. 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.

  8. Radio Buttons Choose vertical or horizontal alignment.  “No answer” option added by default when question is not required.
    questionnaire radio button

  9. Rate (scale 1..5) For this question type you have two display options. The default option displays the Likert scale degrees as numbers (1...5). If you prefer to have named degrees instead of numbers, you'll have to enter those names in the Possible answers list (see Example 3 above). On each line of "possible answers" enter the degree number, immediately followed by the equal sign = immediately followed by the name you want to give to that degree.  To have more than one item being rated, enter these labels on separate lines in the Possible Answers box  (without the number=).  For more information, click on the blue question mark help icon next to the possible answers box in your rate question.

  10. Text Box You can set the Input box length of the Text Box and the maximum text length of text entered.

  11. Yes/No 

  12. NoteRadio Buttons and Check Boxes can feature an optional Other button/box with a fill-in-the-blank text field by typing !other as an answer choice (or !other=Label for choice with text field after it)

Advanced Settings

  To use the advanced features of your Questionnaire, click the Advanced Settings tab. You will see the following:

 


 
In this interface, you can add a Subtitle and Additional Info to your Questionnaire. This text will display at the top of the Questionnaire before the list of questions.

You can also select from a few alternate Themes for the Questionnaire.

Scroll down, and you will see the Submission options.

 


 
Here, you can control what happens once a participant completes your Questionnaire. Most users use a Confirmation message.
  • Enter the heading text - For example, "Questionnaire Completed" or "Success! You've complete the Questionnaire.
  • Enter the body text - For example, "Thank you for participating in our Questionnaire. Your candid feedback will help us improve this class in the future.
  • The teacher can elect to receive a copy of each Questionnaire submission by entering their email address in the Email text box.
  • Click 'Save settings' and you will return to the Questionnaire View.