We have a questionnaire shared with multiple courses. Students have filled it out and their responses have been stored in the main course as expected, except some of the student's answers are associated with the wrong course - not the course the student filled out the questtionnare, and for courses that the student's are not even enrolled in. This didn't happen for all students and wouldn't have been noticed if the answers to the questions didn't make sense to the course they were recorded against. After talking to the student, they said they filled out the questionnaire in the correct course (not the course for which their answers got recorded). We're on 1.9.11 of moodle. From looking in the database, it doesn't look like there's any way to determine what responses are correctly associated with their course and which ones aren't. It'd be nice if there was, but we're more concerned with how this happened, and how to prevent again. Anyone else run in to something like this?
Hi Dave, could you supply more info please?
I suppose that questionnaire was first created as "public" in the course you call "the main course". Are students enroled in that course? (They should not).
Then I suppose questionnaire instances were created in other courses, by copying that "public questionnaire".
Are the students enroled in more than one course where those instances were created from the public questionnaire?
If you would give us the full scenario, then I might try to reproduce it and find out about your problem.
"some of the student's answers are associated with the wrong course" What does that mean exactly?
ATB
Joseph
EDIT.- I've just tried to reproduce the problem on my local moodle 1.9 test site and couldn't.
It's my understanding that there are students enrolled in the "main" course that hosts the questionnaire. It was a "public" questionnaire , was shared to other courses, and students can (and are) enrolled in multiple courses that the questionnaire was shared with. Is that a problem, if they are in enrolled in multiple courses that have the shared questionnaire?
What I mean by "student's answers are associated with the wrong course" is that when we download the answers to text file (from the main course), that student's answers say they correlate to course 1058 (it's one of the fields in the download file), but the student isn't enrolled in 1058, and that student's answers are really in response to the questionnaire shared in course 1078. (We spoke with the student so we know what course the questionnaire was filled out in.) Does that make more sense? I'm not sure how else to describe it.
The full scenario: Our faculty wanted to use the questionnaire as a course evaluation, which they read other schools were doing. They created a questionnaire in one of their existing courses, shared to other courses and asked students to fill it out. The questionnaire (course evaluation) was shared with all business department courses so students would be in multiple business courses, but would fill out a separate questionnaire in each course. The instructor of the "main" course would download the answers and distribute them out to the appropriate instructors as appropriate. It sounds like they should have created a new course to house the questionnaire as the "main course" rather than using one of their courses that the students answer the questionnaire in, correct?
I've tried to recreate the situation in our test system and haven't been able to.
1.- Dave "It sounds like they should have created a new course to house the questionnaire as the "main course" rather than using one of their courses that the students answer the questionnaire in, correct? "
Correct! The idea of a public questionnaire is to create it in a "special" course which is not available to students (and even not available to teachers if the responses are to be visible only to the admin, for example).
2.-"Is that a problem, if they are in enrolled in multiple courses that have the shared questionnaire?"
Well, if that is the case, nothing prevents the students to answer that questionnaire several times, in each course where they are enroled and where the questionnaire is made available.
3.- "What I mean by "student's answers are associated with the wrong course" is that when we download the answers to text file (from the main course), a) that student's answers say they correlate to course 1058 (it's one of the fields in the download file), but the student isn't enrolled in 1058, b) and that student's answers are really in response to the questionnaire shared in course 1078. (We spoke with the student so we know what course the questionnaire was filled out in.) Does that make more sense? I'm not sure how else to describe it."
a) This seems quite unlikely.
b) If the original public questionnaire was copied to several courses on your moodle site, and that student is enrolled in those courses, how can you be certain that that student only answered the questionnaire in course 1078?
Anyway, if you cannot reproduce the problem on your moodle site any more than I can reproduce it on my moodle test site, I do not see how we can sort things out.
Joseph
PS. When you write "[The teachers] created a questionnaire in one of their existing courses, shared to other courses and asked students to fill it out." it is still not clear to me WHO did WHAT.
OK. I'll try to explain clearer. The instructor assigned to course 1058 created a public questionnaire and asked the instructors in other courses (like 1078, 1061, etc.) to add the questionnaire to their course. The students enrolled in courses 1058,1078,1061 all answer the questionnaire. The students may be in multiple courses so they might answer the questionnaire mutiple times, but that's OK (with us) since the questionnaire is a course evaluation. When we download the answers to a text file, the course is included along with their responses, so we can sort out what answers go to which course then. Other schools have said they were doing course evaluations this way so we didn't think having a student fill out a questionnaire from multiple courses would be a problem. Is it? We're ok with not being able to sort out things this time, but want to make sure we're using the questionnaire correctly, and that it's going to work the way we need to for next time.