The 'Recent Activity' module records the names of students who respond to a feedback activity that is set as 'anonynomous'. When I look at the responses to the feedback, no names are available. However a recent activity report shows the names and times students completed the feedback activity. So, in fact, it is not anonymous - quite the opposite: the 'Recent Activity' box on the main course page broadcasts the names of anyone who responds to every student the next time they login.
Any plans to change this?
Russell
But presumably all it is doing is saying who has given feedback -not what precisely they have said - so it is still anonymous. If you don't want that to appear you could hide or delete the recent activity box I suppose.
I guess it depends on your point of view about anonymity. I would prefer it would be truly anonymous - students can comment any time with no possibility of their identity being known. This is a big selling point for me about Moodle - the ability for student feedback to affect the progress of course, rather than just providing feedback at the end of a course, and affecting the course for future students.
The recent activity record also means I *can* figure out who responded, and therefore I cannot present the feedback as *guaranteeing* anonymity. That is pretty important, I believe.
Deleting recent activity removes one easy tool students and instructors can use to keep up to date on all aspects of the course. Not an ideal work around.
R
The recent activity record also means I *can* figure out who responded, and therefore I cannot present the feedback as *guaranteeing* anonymity. That is pretty important, I believe.
Deleting recent activity removes one easy tool students and instructors can use to keep up to date on all aspects of the course. Not an ideal work around.
R
Russell - With Feedback slated for inclusion in Moodle core for 2.0, I would like to make sure that we get this right even if it requires some patching to the recent activity module. Would you mind filing an issue in the tracker and let me know the issue number so that I can look into this issue further. One of the challenges was that teachers wanted to know who had completed a feedback without being able to figure out who said what and part of that includes, at least in my mind, not knowing specifically when a particular student submitted a response. We had similar discussions and concerns around using groups. Thanks for being part of the dialogue in thinking through how this can be handled. Peace - Anthony
Done... at least as best I could... which isn't saying much. I couldn't find either the feedback module or recent activity module in the list of components.
Also, I'm a faculty user not admin, so don't have access to even the version number (our theme doesn't seem to display it anywhere...)
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-1626
R
Also, I'm a faculty user not admin, so don't have access to even the version number (our theme doesn't seem to display it anywhere...)
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-1626
R
Hi Russell,
I tend to agree with Mary's view about anonymity.
You write "The recent activity record also means I *can* figure out who responded". Yes, but being able to figure out who responded does not mean that you have to. And, as Mary said, just knowing who has responded does not mean you know who responded what. Surely your own ethics in the matter should be enough to guarantee that you will not take pains to remove the anonymity that you claim to guarantee to the students. I am really puzzled at your reasoning.
Joseph
I tend to agree with Mary's view about anonymity.
You write "The recent activity record also means I *can* figure out who responded". Yes, but being able to figure out who responded does not mean that you have to. And, as Mary said, just knowing who has responded does not mean you know who responded what. Surely your own ethics in the matter should be enough to guarantee that you will not take pains to remove the anonymity that you claim to guarantee to the students. I am really puzzled at your reasoning.
Joseph
- You can easily inadvertently discover who responded - that's why I posted this. 3 student responded, another student noticed their names, and let me know that the feedback wasn't anonymous, I looked at the recent activity, and presto, I know who made the last 3 comments. So that student at least takes my view, and I have non-anonymous feedback. Fortunately, none of the comments were of a nature where anonymity would be important. Of course I will do my utmost to not bias my treatment of any of those 3 students (easy in this case), but that's NOT the same as guaranteeing anonymity.
- I'm now faced with a situation where I either do not notify the class, and the student who noticed may spread the rumour that it's not anonymous. Or I tell them that since I want to keep the recent activity function, I won't look at the feedback until the class is over and grades are submitted. In either case I completely undermine the point of having on-going truly--guaranteed-anonymous feedback. Simply promising to not discover the identity of respondents is not at all the same as guaranteeing anonymity. Its the *students* perception that matters most. We have an unequal relationship, and any doubts about anonymity will make them disinclined to provide useful feedback.
- Imagine rolling out Moodle to a faculty where 10% are comfortable with anything more than MS Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. You tell them: 2 great things about Moodle are the 'recent activity' box than allows students to keep complete tabs on all updates to the site. The other is an anonymous feedback system. But they can't use both? Or if they do, they have to be careful to never look at the recent activity? How long would it take a student body of 1000s to discover the hitch in the system and spread the news?
If we're just going to rely on my ethics in the matter, why have anonymity at all?
If we are going to rely on my ethical purity, I can just as easily ignore the respondents names where they are linked to the responses.
R
Sorry Joseph, but I beg to differ here. If as a teacher you guarantee anonymity to the class (or any other population for that matter), it should IMO not be up to the class to display the ethics not trying to figure out who says what when names appear in the Recent Activity report.
If you would use ethical dilemmas as topics in your feedback activity and you would invite students to 'open up' on the matter anonymously, then I foresee that as a teacher you'd be doing quite a lot of repair work when the students find out that with a little effort answers can be traced back to the person who said it.
I tried to reproduce this on our own moodle installation, but found out that Feedback activities are not recorded in the recent activity reports. It makes me wonder what we did wrong, but that's another issue.
However, I do hope that this issue will be looked at for the roll out of Moodle 2.0 or perhaps even earlier.
Julian
If you would use ethical dilemmas as topics in your feedback activity and you would invite students to 'open up' on the matter anonymously, then I foresee that as a teacher you'd be doing quite a lot of repair work when the students find out that with a little effort answers can be traced back to the person who said it.
I tried to reproduce this on our own moodle installation, but found out that Feedback activities are not recorded in the recent activity reports. It makes me wonder what we did wrong, but that's another issue.
However, I do hope that this issue will be looked at for the roll out of Moodle 2.0 or perhaps even earlier.
Julian
Julian - I think I understand your concern and agree that for anonymous feedbacks the completion should not be recorded in the activity report. I am working on a patch for that. I had worked on the anonymous functionality for the feedback module a while back and given some thought to this. One of the challenges is that teachers want to be able to see which students completed the feedback and which ones did not. To do this, the completion of the feedback is logged so the teacher can see that a particular student completed it but as has been noted provided there is more than one student responding the teacher cannot determine who said what as the order of the responses are shuffled when viewing them. If we simply do not report to the recent activity is that sufficient to address the concerns raised? Thanks for your help in thinking this through. The better we can make it the better so I appreciate all the help I can get in looking at it from multiple perspectives. Let me know how I can be of help. Peace - Anthony
p.s. - Is there a tracker issue for this? If not, let's go ahead and create one. BTW, sorry for the delayed response as I was finishing up classes.
p.s. - Is there a tracker issue for this? If not, let's go ahead and create one. BTW, sorry for the delayed response as I was finishing up classes.
FYI - I have created MDL-21201 to resolve this issue in HEAD and CONTRIB (for both the Moodle 1.9 and 2.0 versions of the feedback activity module). A patch is included for testing and response. Please feel free to vote, comment, and watch MDL-21201 for further progress on this issue. Peace - Anthony
I want to reinforce what others have said here. In my case, we want some honest commentary on our final year courses passed on to students who are away the year before their final year on placement. We do not want the current students to feel worried or hopeful that their comments might affect their mark, nor do we want to wait until after they've graduated to try to solicit their advice. I do not personally want to vouch that no member of staff would ever try to use the overly-panoptical power of moodle to try to figure which student is saying what.
We need to be sure that the comments are only available to our own students, so we need moodle's login, but otherwise I'd really much rather use another website for this.
We need to be sure that the comments are only available to our own students, so we need moodle's login, but otherwise I'd really much rather use another website for this.
Hi, folks,
I searched a lot in the moodle forum and in the Moodle Tracker about anonymity regarding the feedback module, but I couldn’t find the answers I'm looking for. I hope that anybody here can help me.
We are using Moodle 2.3.6+ with LDAP authentication and we would like to evaluate our courses via the feedback module. For us it is absolutely important to guarantee that the answers from the students are 100% anonymous. If not, we fear that they will not fill out the questionnaires (we already did a survey on this issue).
To find out if the answers from the feedback module are anonymous we looked into the database and found out that feedback answers and users can be related. With the table "mdl_feedback_completed" you find which feedback was filled out from which user because of 'userid' and 'feedback'. Ditto in the table "mdl_feedback_tracking". The table "mdl_feedback_value" holds the answers and a not declared foreign key 'completed' which corresponds to "mdl_feedback_completed" holding the 'userid'. Also "mdl_feedback_tracking" contains the 'completed' key.
In addition, the"mdl_log" table contains information on when a certain user filled out a feedback form. With this information and knowing the order of the entries in the database one can uncover response behaviour of certain users.
We are not sure if there are additional ways to break anonymity, because unfortunately the moodle documentation seems not to be complete in regard to keys, especially foreign keys.
Has anybody here a solution to guarantee true anonymity for the feedback module?
THX a lot in advance,
regards, Silvia
The closest thing you can do (which is what I do with my teacher evaluations) is put the feedback on the front page. This way the students do not have to log in to access it and at that point it cannot be tracked to any particular user.
If you were going to do this, I would suggest using a separate Feedback form for each course, as otherwise, (depending on the questions you ask) it can be difficult to associate feedback with the relevant course the student experienced.
Just have them select the teacher they are submitting feedback for in the first question. As soon as you put it in a course, the student has to log in and then it is not anonymous.