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, a 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. Setting up Feedback:
The teacher in our Vegetarian Cooking course adds a feedback activity by turning on the
editing, selecting Feedback from the activity chooser and then giving it a name and a 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 user names 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 might want 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 you can set completion only when a student completes and submits
the Feedback. When we save and display we can add our questions
by clicking the edit questions link and choosing from the dropdown. Here is 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 responss.
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, let's look at those other tabs:
We can edit the questions from the Edit tab; we can save the questions as a template to
use elsewhere or we can import a previously made 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 seen. To summarise:
Feedback allows you to listen to learners and improve their course experience.