Feedback: listen to your learners
It is essential as educators that we listen to our learners to gauge their opinions and
improve our teaching.
There are several Moodle activities for surveying students.
Here we look at Feedback, which allows you to create your own questions of different
types.
In this Feedback activity the student is asked to give her opinion on the course.
She has multiple choice questions, short text questions and a longer text question.
This student didn’t use the Moodle app but when our second student completes the feedback
and responds yes to the Moodle app question, note that he is then presented with some extra,
response-specific questions.
With the Feedback activity you can make questions display dependent on previous responses.
Our teacher Sam in their Basic French course adds Ffeedback activity by enabling Edit mode,
clicking Add and activity or resource and selecting Feedback from the activity chooser,
Feedback is an activity because learners interact with it.
Click once to go straight to the set up screen or click the i icon for more information and
then the Add button bottom right.
Give it a name and an optional description, which may be displayed on the course page
by ticking the box.
Other settings can be expanded by clicking the links.
Availability allows you to set a period of time when the feedback will or will not be
available.
In Question and submission settings you can choose whether the submissions are anonymous
or usernames are recorded.
Note this is not totally secure as the logs will still reveal identities.
You can allow users to submit more than once – you’ll need this for anonymous feedback
– to be notified when feedback is completed and to have questions auto-numbered or not.
After submission – once students have completed the feedback, you can provide a link to the
analysis; you can add a message of thanks or information and you can give a link to
another part of the course if you feel it is necessary.
In activity completion, to track that students have accessed the Feedback activity, do we
want them to manually click to confirm they have seen it, or do we want it automatically
marked complete when they have simply viewed it or submitted Feedback?
No need to select View as well as the requirement to submit.
To alert course participants that a Feedback activity has been added or updated, click
Send content change notification -
When we save and display we can add our questions by clicking Edit questions.
We can add questions from a template or import questions but teacher Sam is going to create
their own, choosing from the dropdown.
Here’s a multiple choice question.
We tick the box if we want to force students to answer this question and we can allow one
or multiple answers and we add the answers.
Setting Not selected to Yes means this doesn’t appear as an option.
Answers appear on separate lines.
Here’s a short text answer question.
It’s worth experimenting with textfield width and maximum characters accepted.
Now we can continue our feedback by adding more questions.
But let’s try making some responses dependent on previous responses.
As we make this new multiple-choice question about the Moodle app, we give it a label.
This is important for future reference.
We then have to add a page break and we need to add another page break at the end of the
dependent questions.
So we are enclosing them on their own page.
For each conditional question we add we must Choose a Dependence item – that’s the
label we added before.
So this question depends on the question with the label Moodle app.
Then we must choose the Answer our new question will depend on.
We select Yes, because we only want the question to appear if students tell us that Yes, they
used the Moodle app.
You see these dependent questions appear in grey to the teacher.
Once we’ve added any dependent questions, it’s important to remember to add that second
Page break…and then we can continue with any further questions which apply to all students.
Finally, note we can export the questions or save as a new template.
Once students have completed the feedback, a graphical analysis is available also in
chart form and downloadable to Excel, and individual responses can also be downloaded
and viewed.
To summarise: Feedback allows you to listen to learners and improve their course experience.