TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction
• Create a survey
  • Create a Survey without AI
    • Matrix questions
  • Create Survey With AI
    • Detailed information
• Survey - predefined answer alternatives
  • Summary
  • Export Results

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. 

Create a survey

You have the option to create a survey tool with or without the assistance of AI.

Create a Survey without AI

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:

• Open question
• Yes/no
• Multiple choice (one or multiple answers)
• 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.

Create Survey With AI

Simple steps to get started

1. Add a new survey in your course by choosing Survey from the add page
2. Select the tab 'Create survey with AI'
3. In the text input field, write what your survey is about
4. Select number of questions to generate
5. Select type of survey (non-anonymous, anonymous, external)
6. Click 'Generate survey'

Detailed information

First of all, if you do not see this option, your administrator has not enabled AI for your site. Please visit the general AI feature documentation for explanation of the setting, and also more details regarding the service we use and answers to data protection concerns.

When you create a new survey, there is an extra tab at the top where you can select 'Create survey with AI'. This tab contains a short explanation, an input field, selector for number of questions and setting for anonymous and external survey. There is also more information available at the bottom of the page to understand how this feature works and how data is treated.

• The input field is limited to 255 characters.
• You can select 5, 7, 10 or 15 questions.
• All the generated will be multiple choice and have the same answer options using the agreement scale (one of the pre-defined options for answer alternatives).

Once you click 'Generate survey' the data is sent to Azure OpenAI (EU hosted), and we create a survey with introduction based on the free text input.

After the survey is generated it is just like any other survey, and can be edited to tailor it to your needs. We strongly recommend reviewing it before publishing to the students, as we do not guarantee the accuracy or quality of data returned from the AI service. 

Survey - predefined answer alternatives

To save you time when creating a survey, we have added an option to use predefined answer alternatives in multiple choice and matrix questions. The predefined alternatives are specified below.

List name	Top alternative →				← bottom alternative
Custom This results in blank fields, and is selected by default.
Numbered scale (1-5)	1	2	3	4	5
Agreement	Strongly disagree	Disagree	Neither agree nor disagree	Agree	Strongly agree
Quality	Very poor	Poor	Fair	Good	Excellent
Satisfaction	Not at all satisfied	Slightly satisfied	Moderately satisfied	Very satisfied	Completely satisfied
Importance	Not at all important	Slightly important	Moderately important	Very important	Extremely important
Frequency	Never	Rarely	Sometimes	Often	Always
Emojis		:|

Once your respondents start answering your survey, the list of responses is populated. It will show both ongoing and submitted responses, and a time stamp of how long ago it was submitted. Ongoing responses will also say how long ago they were started.

From this list, you are allowed to:

• Open a submitted (completed) response to see the details
• Delete a submitted response
• Delete an ongoing response

If you allow submission of the survey after the deadline, late submissions will be marked in the "Note" column.

Summary

In the summary tab you can find a summary of all the submitted responses, by question. This will show you how many responses there are in total, but also responses per question, so you can easily identify if some questions were left unanswered by one or more respondents.

Export Results

In the summary tab there is an option to download all the responses as an excel file. This is a complete export of the survey, where all the questions are listed in one sheet and all the responses in another. The format is similar to the result export in the test tool, and allows you to perform your own statistics, create graphs etc. 

Extra user information is also supported in the export for non-anonymous surveys.