Opinio, Moodle questionnaire, survey monkey

It is useful to consider how the module or programme can be improved for future. Often this information is only collected upon completion of the module or programme. By this stage current students will not benefit from changes to the course. In this section we look at ways to gather continual feedback during the course and methods for encouraging students to complete feedback forms.

There are a couple tools that can be used to gather feedback from students.

The Moodle questionnaire allows you to ask questions (anonymously*) and then download the results for analysis in a Spreadsheet tool, like Excel. You can remind those students who haven't completed the questionnaire to do so by email, using the in-built Moodle course participation report. The Moodle questionnaire tool does not support branching, so you cannot ask students different questions based on their previous answers. If you need this functionality you should look at using Opinio instead.

The Opinio survey tool allows you to set up branched questionnaires that you can then email to your students to complete. The results can be downloaded for analysis in a Spreadsheet tool, like Excel. Reminders can be set up to automatically send out at certain dates, to just those who haven't completed the survey. The require a little more admin to set up, since you need to upload a list of student email addresses in to the system. The alternative is to provide a link to the survey from Moodle, but doing this means you cannot track who has and hasn't responded, or send automated reminders.

*Although there is an anonymous setting for Moodle questionnaires, it is possible for staff to compare the questionnaire submission time to the course logs to identify which student replied when. In some cases departments have decided against using Moodle questionnaires for this reason and have opted for Opinio instead.