Review: Activity module Questionnaire for Moodle 2.0

Todays review Module is Moodle 2.0 Activity Module: Questionnaire. It was one of the first Activities to be updated to Moodle 2 and is available for both Moodle 1.9 and Moodle 2.0.

Background

This block has been around for over 5 years, originally based on the hugely popular phpESP. It worked on Moodle 1.5 onwards providing a really easy way to create your own surveys. It is maintained by Mike Churchward from Remote-Learner Moodle Partner and Joseph Rézeau .

Down the road it is planned to have this module, the Feedback Module and the Survey activity merged into one all powerful tool, but until then you have all 3.

What does it do?

The Questionnaire activity is a custom survey activity which allows teachers to create a wide range of questions using many question types to get student feedback or collate research.

Each questionnaire is created from a toolkit of question types and labels or page breaks.

The question types are:

• Check Boxes
• Date Box
• Dropdown choices
• Essay box – HTML editor possible, set width and height of box
• Numeric – can set length and number of decimal places
• Radio buttons – have labels you determine for each question
• Scale – can customize in many ways
• Text box
• Yes/no

The options while creating the activity are equally impressive as you can see in the below screenshot.

Questionnaire options

These give you the opportunity to use templates, set start/end times, and configure the questionaire for many many use cases. Also if needed, you can choose to have anonymous submissions as well.

Is it simple to install?

The block is in contrib, so all versions of it are downloadable from moodle.org including the Moodle 2.0 version.  The source code is available for browsing through the contrib web interface. The zip when downloaded holds one folder which contains the files for the block.

You need to upload the quesitonnaire folder to your modfolder in your Moodle site.

When upgrading through the notifications page, I got no errors and it just installed. There was no new global settings either.

The README gave good information.

Is there documentation for it?

The Plugin Entry for Questionnaire has no instructions for how to download, however there is a Moodle Docs page and a comprehensive README file which not only explain how to install, but explain the basic features as well.

There is a second README as well with documented changes from prior versions. There is also a dedicated forum for discussions on the questionnaire module.

Is it easy for the teacher/admin to use?

This feature is straight forward once installed. Anyone who has used web based questionnaires/surveys before will find this familiar ground.

You can add the questions one at a time, and if you need help the Moodle Docs information is available.

Questionnaire Questions

Once you have the questions added you can easily preview the layout of your questionnaire as below:

preview

You can also use some advances settings as well which includes setting the quesitonnaire to be Private, a Template or a Public questionnaire which can be shared among courses.

Is it easy for the learner/student to use?

The student just uses it the same way as any assignment type. They just get to complete the questionnaire the way the teacher has chosen to set it up and if it is set to be graded, a score will appear in the gradebook.

Does it do what it promises?

This is a very powerful tool for the teacher and institution. The flexibility of use with all the different options enable many its use in different ways. The templating feature is really quite useful as is the ability to have public cross-course questionnaires.

Its hard to choose between this and the Feedback module as they are both great, but this one has the more options and therefore the more possibilities for use.

Stars: 4 out of 5 stars for this block.

**Standard Reminder**

These reviews check out the plugin for usability not for security. If you are considering installing any module on your site you should also check that is secure and does not impact the server performance.