Overview
The Feedback activity is a student-survey tool. It's ideal for requesting feedback on your course or teaching, but you can use it to get feedback on any topic, or to stimulate students to brainstorm or sharing ideas on any topic. In the Feedback tool, the questions aren't graded - if you want to grade students' answers, use the Quiz tool.
See the following page for a comparison of the Feedback, Choice and Questionnaire activities.
When to use
Use the Feedback tool when you want students' opinions on any matter. For example, you might want to find out what they think of your course as a whole or of specific topics, activities or aspects within it. Or you might use it to gather opinions on any topic within or related to the course.
Benefits
Obtaining feedback on your teaching is essential for your course evaluation process and your self-reflection as a teacher. You can view responses to the questions as a summary or detailed analysis, or by individual user. You can specify that responders remain anonymous, if necessary.
The Feedback tool is useful for sparking students' interest in a topic before they begin studying it. You can use it to canvass student opinions about course topics, or as a brainstorming tool.
Guide
Step by step instructions
Create a Feedback activity
- On the course home page, click Turn editing on.
- In the appropriate week or topic section click Add an activity, select Feedback from the pop-up list.
- On the Adding a new Feedback page, click Expand all at the upper right, then in the General section enter a Name and some Description indicating how the feedback will be used.
- Under Availability, select the Enable check boxes and select date, month, year, hour and minutes into the Allow answers from and the Allow answers to fields.
- Under Question and submission settings, select whether:
- feedback can be submitted anonymously
- users can submit more than one piece of feedback
- an email will notify you of each submission
- you want questions automatically numbered.
- Under After submission:
- Decide whether Moodle should display an analysis of the feedback received so far to students once they've submitted their own feedback.
- Enter the text you want to display to the student once they've submitted their feedback (e.g. "Thank you for completing these questions...").
- Paste in an alternative URL, if you want to redirect students to somewhere other than the course home page when they click Continue.
- Complete the remaining fields as necessary and click Save and display. The feedback Overview page displays, where you an begin to create your questions (see the next set of instructions).
Create questions
The Edit questions page is where you not only create questions for your Feedback activity, but also decide on the layout for your survey. As well as the 5 types of questions available, you can add:
- page breaks
- a captcha (an online mini-test, usually of visual perception, designed to prevent spambots completing online forms)
- information and
- labels (headings).
To create questions and other elements, and to determine the layout of a Feedback survey:
- On the feedback Overview page (accessed by clicking the Feedback activity's link on the course home page), select the Edit questions tab.
- On the Edit questions page, Select a question type, or a page element (page break, captcha, information, label) from the drop-down list.
- A page break or captcha will display in the Preview section without further input from you. For information, a label or a question, complete the resulting page as appropriate.

You can specify whether questions are Required for the feedback to be considered complete.
- You can create a question that will display only if the user answers another question in a certain way. Such a question structure is created as follows:
- First create the question on which the second question will depend.
- Add a page break (on the Edit questions page, select Add a page break).
- Create the question that depends on the value of the answer to the first question. Into the Dependence item field, select the first question, and in the Dependence value field enter the answer that must be selected for this second question to display.
So a sample branching question structure might be:
- Item 1 (multiple-choice question): Do you own a car? Possible answers: Yes/No
- Item 2: Page break
- Item 3a: What model is your car? (This item depends on item 1 being answered with the value Yes.)
- Item 3b: Why don't you have a car? (This item depends on item 1 being answered with the value No.)
- Click Save question.
- On the Edit questions page, in the Preview section, you can move (using the Move this question icon
) or delete any page break or captcha; move, edit or delete any information, label or question; or change the Required status of any question.
- Once the Feedback activity is saved, you can edit questions by clicking the activity's link in the course home page, then selecting the Edit questions tab on the Overview page, as in step 1.
Additional information
Further assistance
If you experience technical or other issues, consult the Where to get help page.