Moodle: Create a questionnaire

The Moodle Questionnaire activity allows you to survey Moodle course participants for the purpose of gathering information. Questions do not have a “right” answer (as they must in Quiz), and responses can be anonymous or identified, and can optionally be displayed to students.

Questionnaire is useful for gathering biographical or diagnostic information from students at the start of a course, gathering student feedback, and metacognitive self-reflection or gathering ideas or review questions from students. Many paper-based Classroom Assessment Techniques can be adapted as Questionnaire activities, and you can set up the questionnaire so that students periodically reply (e.g., daily or weekly) to collect responses over time. You can save and/or publish a Questionnaire you’ve created as a template so that you and/or colleagues can adopt it across multiple courses. Our educational technologists are happy to help you design or adapt questionnaires to meet your pedagogical needs.

Before you start, you may need the following:

an Instructor of Record or Other Editing Teacher role in a Bryn Mawr Moodle course.

Create a questionnaire activity

In your Moodle course, toggle Edit mode on.
Go to the section in your course where you would like the questionnaire to be and click on +Add an activity or resource, and select Questionnaire.
Give the Questionnaire a Name and (optionally) a Description.
You can optionally use the standard Availability, Activity Completion, and Restrict Access settings to control when the Questionnaire is available and/or whether students must complete it before they can access other activities.
Adjust the Response Options to control how the questionnaire works:
- Type: The default is “respond many”; change this if you want to limit students to responding once or daily, weekly, or monthly.
- Respondent Type: Default is “fullname”; change to “anonymous” if you do not want students' names associated with their responses.
- Students can view ALL responses: Default is "After answering the questionnaire"; change to “never” if you don’t want students to see each others’ responses. Other choices control when responses are revealed — for example, if you are using a questionnaire to solicit potential review or exam questions from students, you might want to choose “always” so they can see what others have already submitted and avoid duplicates.
- Send submission notifications: Default is no; adjust if you want to receive a notice or full copy of the response via message/email when someone submits.
- Save/Resume answers: Default is “no”; consider changing to “yes” for long surveys or surveys with short answer responses so that respondents can save their progress as they go.
- Allow branching questions: Default is “no”; change if you want to have students elaborate on answers yes/no or multiple choice questions.
- Autonumbering: Default is “autonumber pages and questions”; consider turning it off if you allow branching questions.
- Submission grade: Default is “no grade”; change to give students a fixed number of points for submitting responses as an incentive.
The Content options settings control where the questions on the activity come from. Create new is the default, or you can choose an existing Questionnaire as a template.
Click Save and Display when you are finished.

Attention: “Public” questionnaires collect data from students across multiple courses. Responses from all courses are collected into a single questionnaire, and visible to the questionnaire’s creators in the course where it was created.

Add questions and view responses

The Questionnaire interface is very similar to the Quiz interface. In a new, blank questionnaire you will be prompted to add questions, but in all other cases, when you click on the Questionnaire activity you will see several tabs:

Advanced settings. Save a questionnaire as a template or make it public to collect data for students in multiple courses (Moodle Docs on creating a questionnaire).
Questions. Add, edit, and reorder the questions in your questionnaire. There is a drop-down menu to choose different types of questions to add to your questionnaire. Once you add questions you can configure them in them under 'Manage questions'.
Preview. See what the questionnaire looks like for respondents.
Your responses. Hidden until the viewer has responded to the survey.
All responses. Hidden until someone responds, then visible to Teachers and to Students only if and when you’ve allowed this with the Students can view all responses setting described above. Responses can be displayed in several ways:
- Summary: View the aggregated responses for each question.
- List of responses: View all responses as a table, alphabetized by last name if non-anonymous. Mouse over a response to see the time stamp (useful for questionnaires that can be answered more than once, and click on the respondent’s name to see their responses individually. Use the Download in text format to export all responses as a CSV file you can open in Excel or other spreadsheet or statistical software.
- View individual responses: View all responses an individual gave on a single page.
Show non-respondents. Visible to Teachers only, this tab lists all participants who haven’t responded, with the option to send them a reminder message.