Creating simple student polls with the Choice tool

- These days, mainstream websites ask questions to engage their audience or to collect important information. For example, the SAT site may ask a good math question that you can use for your algebra class. News sites often ask for opinions about topics like recent events or high-profile people, which might start a classroom discussion. You can do the same thing with the Moodle Choice tool. Here are some reasons instructors use Choice: Conduct a simple background knowledge probe to see what students already know.

Check students' confidence levels about how well they understand a course topic. You can identify the most relevant or meaningful real-life examples of course concepts for students, or you can solicit student opinions to stimulate a classroom discussion. Let's take a look at how you can create a simple one-question poll with the Choice tool. First, we'll turn editing on, using the button in the top right corner. Next, we'll scroll to the appropriate topic area where you want the choice to live.

Then we'll click the Add an activity or resource link in the bottom right corner. We'll click Choice from the list of activities and click Add at the bottom of the window. On the Adding a new Choice page, we'll put a short, catchy poll question in the Choice name. In the Description field, enter the instructions, which should include the question again as well as any details about the activity. I'll copy and paste the question, and then add some details.

I'll scroll down and I'll select how the options will display. If it's a long list, more than four or five options, pick vertical. So I'll use this menu, and choose Display vertically. Under the Options category, you'll see we have a number of things we can select. Use the Allow choice to be updated menu to make it possible for students to change their response. Set it to Yes if they can change their mind or No if they have only one chance to respond.

I'll say Yes. Next is a new feature in Moodle 2.8. Now you can allow more than one choice to be selected. This is great if you want students to pick their top three from the list. For this activity we didn't do that, so we'll leave it at No. After that is the menu called Limit the number of responses allowed. Set this menu to Yes if only a certain number of students can pick each option. This is a good setting if you want students to form teams of equal size. Set this menu to No if everyone can pick the same option.

For example, if you're asking an opinion question, you don't want to limit how many students can answer the same way. Since I'm asking students to pick their favorite U.S. President, I'm going to say No. Now it's time to enter the options the students will see. You can have as many options you want. After the first five, we'll scroll down and use the Add 3 field(s) to form button to add more. For our purposes, we'll just enter five.

Next, in the Availability category, I'll expand it to look at the options. Here we can choose when and how to publish the results to students. We can restrict the answering to a specific time period by checking the box and setting an end date. I selected April 25th. In the Results category, I'll expand it so we can look at those options too. Use the Publish results menu to select when to show students the results.

You can choose between never, after they respond, after the choice activity closes, or always. I'll select Show after they answer. Next, if you allow students to see the results, the Privacy of results menu becomes active. You can either Publish anonymous results or Publish full results with student names under each option. I'll make it anonymous. Last, you can Show a column for unanswered so students can see how many students haven't responded.

The end, we'll click Save and display to see our work. Now you're ready to engage students with a simple, single-question poll. Choice tool is both easy for both you and your students, and can serve a number of purposes for your course.