Create course surveys with Google Forms

As you plan for courses you’ll be teaching in Spring, you might consider adding web based student surveys to your course activities.  Blackboard includes the capability of performing anonymous surveys with results showing up in the Grade Center.  However, if you are thinking about using surveys in more creative ways, Google Forms might fit your needs.

Surveys can be used in many ways in your course.  You might survey students anonymously to gauge preconceptions or knowledge level about a topic before a class session to help you guide a lecture and class activities.  After the class session, an anonymous survey can allow students to tell you about areas they don’t understand or where they need more information.

Surveys can also be used for instant feedback in a class session – Google Forms can be used on many mobile devices, so it would be workable for quick feedback to guide a discussion if students in the class have a web-capable mobile device or laptop they bring to class.  This mobile ability also makes Google Forms useful for field research and data gathering by students and the ability to share and create surveys with others you choose makes it useful for group projects in courses.

 

To get started with Google Forms and create a survey, just log on to https://docs.google.com/ with your Google account.  You do not need a Google account in order to fill out a survey someone has created.

Choose “Create New” > “Form” from the Google Docs menu.  Use the form to create your survey, entering a title and introductory text and your first question.  Use “Add item” to add new questions to the survey.

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Select “Email this form” to enter a set of addresses and mail a link to your survey.  When your survey is online, you can choose “See responses” to view the data compiled with graphs or the raw information in a spreadsheet.  From the spreadsheet view, you can export the survey in formats that you can use with Excel and similar spreadsheet software.

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You can also embed your survey in a website.  For this blog post, I created a short sample survey you can take by clicking this link.  Or you can fill out the survey below, right here on the blog.

Google has extensive information on getting started with Forms at their help site.  If you would like more information about Google Docs and Google Forms and how surveys can be used in your courses, contact the CIT to speak with a consultant in your discipline area.

Below is an embedded version of the survey created at Google Forms for this blog post.