Add a Questionnaire Activity in Moodle

The Questionnaire activity allows you to survey your students using a wide range of question types. For example, you can collect informal/ungraded student feedback on your course or on a particular topic. You can view all responses or individual student's responses (and control whether or not students see only their own response), and you can download the data collected in a .csv file.

Note:

• Unlike the Quiz activity, the Questionnaire activity is designed primarily to gather information from students, not to assess or test their knowledge. You can, however, set up the Questionnaire for students to receive a grade if they complete the activity.
• Moodle also offers the Choice activity, for single question polls.
• The questions used in a Questionnaire activity are not saved in the Moodle Quiz Question Bank nor can questions from the Question Bank be used in a Questionnaire activity. 

Questionnaire Features

You can create a survey using the following types of questions:

• Check Boxes
• Date Box
• Dropdown choices
• Essay box (for paragraph-length or longer response)
• Numeric
• Radio buttons
• Rate (using a numeric scale, e.g. from 1 to 5)
• Text box (for a brief one line response)
• Yes/no
   

You can also place:

• Page breaks (to divide the questions into a multi-page survey)
• Text labels (e.g., to display information or instructions between questions)

Create a Questionnaire

1. On your course page, click Turn editing on (top right). Editing icons and links will appear.
2. Locate the Topic or Weekly Section where you will add the Questionnaire activity. (If you are using the Collapsed topics format, open the Section.)
3. At the bottom-right of the Section, click + Add an activity or resource. The Activity chooser will open.
4. In the Activity chooser, select Questionnaire. A description will be displayed at right.
5. Click Add. The Adding a new Questionnaire screen will open.
6. In the Name field, enter a name for the Questionnaire. (Required.)
7. In the Summary field, enter the text you want students to see at the top of the Questionnaire. This text precedes the actual questions, which you will specify in a separate step after you finish adding the Questionnaire activity. (Required.)
8. Under Timing (optional), you can set start and end dates limiting when students may take the Questionnaire.
   Note: The Timing settings allow students to view results even after the end date, whereas the Restrict Access setting (see below) hides the activity from view.
   • Use Open Date allows you to set a date and time when students can start responding to the Questionnaire. (If disabled, the questionnaire becomes available for students to take immediately upon its creation.)
   • Use Close Date lets you select the date and time after which students cannot take the Questionnaire. (If disabled, the Questionnaire is available indefinitely.)
9. Set the Response options to customize the way student responses are handled:
   Type determines the frequency with which students may respond:
   • Respond many (default) allows unlimited responses.
   • once, daily, weekly, or monthly restricts how often a student may respond.
   Respondent Type sets whether results will show students' names:
   
   • fullname displays the full names of your students with each response
   • anonymous removes the student names from responses.
     Note: When set to anonymous, instructors will not see names listed in the survey results, but CAN see whether a student has submitted a Questionnaire by checking the Reports for the activity. The report will not identify a particular attempt except by a timestamp, but the timestamp can then be used to trace a particular Questionnaire attempt because those responses are also time stamped.
   Respondent Eligibility requires the use Role overrides. For more information on using role overrides to restrict access to an activity, please contact the Instructional Media Lab.
   Students can view ALL responses determines whether and when students can view a summary of submitted responses (in addition to their own individual response, which they can view anytime):
   
   • Never (default): Students cannot view other submitted responses.
   • After answering the questionnaire: Students may view all submitted responses only after submitting their own response.
   • After the questionnaire is closed: Students may view all submitted responses after the Questionnaire's closing date/time (if set using the options in the Timing section above).
   • Always: Students can view submitted responses at any time, even if they have not answered the Questionnaire first.
   Save/Resume answers
   • No (default) requires students to complete the questionnaire in one sitting.
   • Yes allows students to save answers, and return later to finish the questionnaire.
   Submission grade
   You have the option to assign an overall grade to the questionnaire.
   Note: This is different from the Quiz activity, where you can specify the number of points for each question. For example, if a questionnaire has 10 questions, you cannot grade each question; you can only give each student one grade for the questionnaire activity.
10. Under Content options:
    • To set up your questionnaire starting from a blank form and add questions one by one, select Create new.
    • If you previously created a questionnaire in this course that you wish to reuse, or use as a starting point, select it from the list under Copy existing.
11. Under Common module settings and Restrict access (optional), you can control how students access the questionnaire. For more information on these settings, see Control Access to Resources and Activities in Moodle. If Activity Completion is enabled in your course you may also configure Activity Completion settings.
12. Click Save.  You will be returned to the main page for the course. The next step is to add questions to your Questionnaire.

Add (or Edit) Questions in a Questionnaire

1. On the main page of your course, click on the link to the Questionnaire.  The Questionnaire page opens.
2. Click the Questions tab (top right). The list of questions will appear.
3. • To add a new question, select a question type from the dropdown list (which is set by default to ----Page Break----) and click the Add selected question type.
   • To edit an existing question, click the Update icon () next to the question name. The question configuration screen will open.
4. Configure each question according to the type of question. For all question types:
   • Provide a name for the question in the Question Name edit box.
   • Specify whether the question is a required question by selecting Yes or No in the Response Required field.
   • Format the responses according to the question type. For more information see Questionnaire Module question types on Moodle.org.
5. Click Save changes to finish adding a new question.
   If you are editing an existing question, you can optionally click Save as New Question to create a new question instead of replacing the existing question, for example to create a series of questions that are similar to each other.
6. To preview your questions, click the Preview tab.
7. Once questions have been added, the questionnaire is ready for students to take.  

View Responses

1. Click the name of the Questionnaire to access the Questionnaire's display page.
2. If students have submitted responses, you will see a tab titled All responses (#), where # is the number of responses received thus far.
   • To view responses grouped by question, click the All responses (#) tab. Each question will display all the responses submitted for that question.
   • To view responses grouped by student, click the All responses (#) tab, then click View by Response (below the tabs). Each student's answers will be displayed on a single page, time-stamped with the submission date and time. Click Next to page through student responses.

Download Responses as a text (CSV) file

This feature enables you to save all the responses of a questionnaire to a text file (CSV). This file can then be imported into a spreadsheet (e.g. MS Excel, Apple Numbers or Open Office Calc) or a statistical package for further processing the data.

1. On the main page of your course, click on the link to the Questionnaire. The Questionnaire page opens.
2. If students have submitted responses, you will see a tab titled All responses (#), where # is the number of responses received thus far. Click the All responses (#) tab. All responses will be displayed for each question.
3. Below the top tabs, are two links: View All Responses and View By Response (leave this at View All Responses). In the row of links below View All Responses, click Download in text format (at right). The Options for text download (CSV) page opens.
4. On the Options for text download (CVS) screen, choose one or both options:
   • Include choice codes applies only to certain question types (e.g., radio buttons or dropdown boxes) that require the student to pick from one of a few limited choices. Moodle uses a 'choice code' to denote the selected choice. For example, if a question had three radio button choices "Red", "Blue", or "Green", the corresponding choice codes would be the numbers 1, 2, and 3, to indicate the first, second, and third choices respectively.
   • Include choice text downloads the text for the choice.
     Select one checkbox to download just the code or just the text. Select both checkboxes to include both the codes and the text for the choices in the downloaded text file.
5. Click Download. The text file will be saved to a location on your computer based on your browser settings. For example, if you are using Safari on a Mac, the default setting is to save downloaded files automatically to your Downloads folder.
   

   Note: The text file will be saved in the .csv (Comma Separated Values) format as a tab delimited file that any spreadsheet program will be able to open. Moodle uses the 'tab' (tabulation) character as the separator instead of commas to allow student responses to include a comma as punctuation.