Moodle - Polls & Surveys
- Matthew Harrington
Moodle’s native implementation of in-course polls is handled by the “Choice” activity, with surveys being handled by the “Feedback” activity. An additional activity type, the “Survey” activity, presents courses with a survey with a preset list of questions and options. Surveys are non-customisable, making them of questionable value to anyone not looking to conduct that one specific survey.
Choice
https://docs.moodle.org/403/en/Choice_activity
The Choice Activity allows course creators to ask a question, and learners essentially put themselves into groups based on their choice. This can be used for polling:
The results can be downloaded in a variety of formats as shown above:
ODS
XLS
CSV
It doesn’t appear as though results can be made visible to learners, though Moodle’s permissions system generally allows for extreme role customisation. It may be possible to alter this behaviour because of this.
Choice Activities are not entirely designed for polls, and as such have features non-standard to poll tools (such as limiting “spaces”), and lacks some polling-specific functionality - the tool is unfocused.
Feedback
https://docs.moodle.org/403/en/Feedback_activity
The Feedback activity is designed to gather learner feedback, as the name suggests. It is not intended for social learning, and effectively functions as an ungraded quiz. Learners are posed questions, and their responses are stored for further analysis.
Other Plugins
Moodle also has plugins built by the community to support polls - Poll and Live Poll being the top ones. Poll is generally unimpressive, but live poll has some nice live updating graphics:
There are many other polling tools that boast specific integrations with Moodle. I’ve captured some below for completeness.
Links