The Friday Mailing Postings

7. The difference between the feedback and questionnaire activities

From Friday Mailing 3rd December 2021

This week I want to talk about the difference between the feedback activity and the questionnaire activity. The first difference will be something most users will not notice but it illustrates how addons to Moodle can be written by users who need them. Feedback is a standard part of Moodle, but the questionnaire is an extra plugin created by a Moodle user – in this case the Open University. They clearly thought that there were some limitations in the feedback activity, and I would agree, that is why we include the questionnaire plugin in all Moodle sites. 

So, what are the limitations of feedback? The problem is that you have to save the answer to all the questions in one go. So DO NOT use Feedback to get students to fill in 20 text boxes with their detailed thoughts on something. The questionnaire fixes this by allowing page breaks with the ability to save and carry on later. Another clever feature is adding branching questions, so you can ask if people have food allergies and then ask only those who answer yes to give details. 

I do still recommend the feedback activity for shortlist of questions. One of my favourites uses is to put a video into the first question for people to watch, and then ask one or two multiple-choice questions about the video and a paragraph answer to another question. It is amazing how much more attention students give to a video if they are going to answer questions after it.  Ken