General information about rollout of the new survey tool
The new survey tool (described here) will be rolled out over the summer 2023. All existing surveys including responses will be migrated automatically and the old tool will be removed completely.
- Links to external surveys will stop working. You need to share the link again after the migration.
- The new tool does not support rich content (text formatting, images etc). All content is conserved during migration but it is not possible to make changes to questions with rich content.
Introduction
A survey tool is pretty simple; it allows you to create surveys with a few different question types so you can collect information from your course participants. A survey can also be set to be anonymous, and made external (where you get a link or QR code to share with participants outside your course or even outside itslearning).
Accessibility is a very high priority for us, and when developing the new tool we have focused on good workflows and simplified what we can, so anyone can create and answer a survey no matter their abilities.
Answering a survey is easy, you hit "start" and answer each question as it appears. Survey works on all devices, but is of course dependant on a network connection, like all other tools in itslearning.
Once responses start coming in, you can find both the individual responses and also a nice summary of them. The purpose of a survey is rarely to see each individual response, but rather gauge opinions in a group. We have included an option to download the responses as an excel file, so you can create your own statistics and graphs if you want.
In this page you can read more about creating surveys. To learn more, you can also visit:
Survey - predefined answer alternatives
Create a survey
When you create a survey, you first set it up with a title, an introduction (not mandatory), and decide if it is anonymous (default) or not. It is also possible to create a survey to be available outside itslearning (external survey), these are always anonymous.
Other settings like visibility and deadline are available in the side-menu on the right side of the page like in other itslearning tools. On a small or narrow screen this menu is collapsed on top of the page instead. By default a survey is invisible when created, so you have time to add and fine-tune your questions before making it available to respondents.
After saving the initial setup, you are taken to the Questions tab, where you can add questions. Later you can delete questions, and change the question order by drag and drop. Using a keyboard this is done by pressing <space> on the drag handle to select a question, use arrow keys to move it up and down, and hit <space> again to complete the action.
This page has an option to preview a survey, so you can check how it looks and behaves before distributing it. During preview you will have a shortcut to edit each question. Saving will then take you back to the preview.
We offer 4 question types:
- Yes/no
- Multiple choice (one or multiple answers)
- Open answer
- Matrix
All questions offer a plain text input for the question text, and the question text cannot be empty. Start by clicking "Add questions" and you will arrive at the question creation page. You do not have to select the question type first, this is a simple dropdown select on the page and you can easily switch between the different types, conserving the question text if you should change your mind about the type. The question type can only be changed when you add a question, not when you edit it later.
The "Save and new" button will save the current question and take you directly to adding a new question of the same type. You will see a blue information banner letting you know that your question was saved. Hitting <tab> once will take you directly to the question text input field for an efficient workflow.
For practical and technical reasons we have set a limit of 100 questions. In multiple choice and matrix questions, there is a limit of 20 answer alternatives and statements.
Matrix questions
The name of this question type is rather technical, but describes precisely what it does. The question text is here more a general description of what you would like respondents to consider, while the essential part is a list of statements (rows) and answer alternatives (columns). In essence this is a series of multiple choice questions where you use the same answer alternatives for all of the questions, presented in a compact manner.
Students can give one answer for each statement (row).
To save time, we have added an option to use predefined answer alternatives. You can read more about those here: Survey - predefined answer alternatives
