Creating an anonymous course evaluation

Moodle can be used to give anonymous course evaluations for classes. It is possible to see who has and hasn't completed the evaluation maintaining anonymity. ITS also provides several ways besides Moodle to create course evaluations. Check our Course Evaluations page to see which is best for you.

1 Setup
2 Copying a course evaluation from another course
3 Results
4 Checking Participation

Setup

To set up your own course evaluation, go to a course in Moodle and turn editing on. Pick the location where you want to add the evaluation, then click Add an activity or resource → Questionnaire. Fill out the options as follows:

General: give the questionnaire a name and provide some summary information (e.g. “Please complete the course evaluation”)

Timing: you can optionally specify dates and times that the course evaluation will be available to students.

Recommended Response options:

Type: Respond once
Respondent Type: Anonymous
Students can view ALL responses: Never. See some more detailed information below.
Save/Resume answers: Either choice is fine. We suggest you select “Yes” if your evaluation is long and/or involved so that students can complete part of the evaluation, save their work, and finish the evaluation at a later time.
Allow Branching Questions: This will be "No" for most surveys. Set to "Yes" if you have a more complex questionnaire in which you want to show certain questions based on previous answers.
Auto numbering: Select your preference
Submission grade: If you would like to see who has and hasn’t completed the evaluation (while maintaining the anonymity of the answers), select a grade here. A corresponding entry will be made in the grade area when the student submits a completed course evaluation. For example, if you select “100″, a grade of 100 will show up in the gradebook for that student for the course evaluation. Note: if you are using the gradebook for your course grades but don’t want it to count as a participation grade, then go into the gradebook and make sure to give it zero weight.
Content Options: Generally you will be creating a new survey. It is possible to create a course evaluation template and then use a copy for multiple classes or an entire department. See below for more information.

To ensure that course evaluations remain confidential, we have set a system-wide setting to prevent students from ever viewing all responses to a questionnaire. Because this setting is in place, Students can never view all responses to a survey even if permitted in the questionnaire settings. If you do want students to view all responses to a survey, it is possible to change this setting for an individual survey. Contact ITS (support@swarthmore.edu) to request that your survey settings be updated.

Copying a course evaluation from another course

It is possible to copy a course evaluation from another course or previous semester by setting up the original course evaluation as a "template." See instructions at Create a Questionnaire Template.

Results

Once the first response has been received, click on the questionnaire and find the Results link. Here you can see the survey responses either in aggregate or individually. It is also possible to download the survey responses as a text file.

Checking Participation

To see who has and hasn't completed the course evaluation, click on Grades link (under the course title) and find the grade column that corresponds to your course evaluation. Any student with a score in this column has completed the course evaluation.

You must have set up a Submission Grade in the Questionnaire settings to have the participation recorded in the grade book. See above for Questionnaire settings.