We are students from the University of Vienna (Austria), currently working on a seminar paper on Moodle. For this paper we would need your help.
Nice project, Thomas. What class is it for? Could you tell us who your teacher is? What is the purpose of this class? (education? English practice? programming?)
Also, could you make the questionnaire in Moodle. It has some great survey tools (i.e. Questionnaire Module).
It is for a seminar in the master's course of communication studies at the university of vienna. the seminar deals with communication in elearning und blended learning environments. it is held by prof. thomas bauer: www.thomasbauer.at
i didn't know moodle has a questionnaire module. thank you for this suggestion. we will stay with piratepad this time though, since we would like to get one expert opinion on the topic created by the community.
I really hope you find some time to answer - at least some - questions. As you certainly know there is no "right" or "wrong". thank you for you effort!
Hi Thomas,
Firstly, here's some helpful info on free and open source licensing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software
People don't normally call content "open source". It's more usual to give it a Creative Commons licence: https://creativecommons.org/
Secondly, PiratePad, like EtherPad, is a collaborative document editing platform, so when anyone edits it, i.e. puts answers on the questionnaire, everyone else sees those edits. You could end up with a very long, confusing questionnaire.
If you'd like to use free and open source software to run a survey, perhaps you could try Limesurvey: http://www.limesurvey.org/de/ Although it's quite complicated and difficult to use.
Moodle also has a questionnaire module that you could use or in some cases a quiz (with no grading) can get similar results but with more flexibility.
I hope this helps!
Matt "Moodle also has a questionnaire module that you could use or in some cases a quiz (with no grading) can get similar results but with more flexibility."
I beg to disagree with that statement! The Moodle Quiz activity was never meant to be a "survey-like" activity.
Joseph
Hi Joseph,
Just because it was never meant to be a survey-like activity doesn't mean you can't use it as one. It's sometimes useful to have more than likert scale and short answer type questions ;)
Making sense of the data you get from those different question types might be difficult though.
hi matt. thank you for your comments. i understand why the term "open source questionnaire" is misleading, i won't use it in the paper.
as far as piratepad is concerned, we consciously picked it for this questionnaire, since we would like to get one expert opinion from the community. you might be right that the questionnaire in the end will be very long and confusing, but we decided together with our tutor to give it a try. I have no experience with this sort of questionnaire, so I'm curious about the result.
Which again brings me to my initial question: would you be so kind as to help us with some answers? thank you for your effort! http://piratepad.net/Ml5PyZkMN0
Hi Thomas,
Considering
a) the reliability of piratepad (See Visvanath's comment, and I've also had it fail several times today) and
b) the fact that people have been more than prepared to respond to you here, but so far there are no responses to your 'questionnaire' on PiratePad
you may want to rethink your approach, as identified by a number of the responses you have had in this thread.
I think the responses here and their general advice show a willingness to engage from the Moodle community, but (even though you consciously chose the piratepad method) you may want to rethink your questionnaire if you hope to get any meaningful response for your project.
There's plenty of advice on the thread here about ways to achieve your goal and I'm sure your tutor would be able to come up with more, but I don't think you are going to get the kind of response you want in the format you have presented it.
Richard
Hi Thomas,
I am very sceptical as to the value of your "questionnaire".
1.- You write: "" This does not make sense at all. If your aim is to collect the opinions of a number of persons, and their responses may be edited by other respondents, then the value of the data you will collect is so strongly biased as to be almost nil.
2.- The formulation of your questions is much too long.
3.- All your questions are of the "open" type. Which means the responses will be extremely difficult to process.
I suggest you seriously study how surveys are made in order to a) reliably collect people's opinions in order to b) process the collected data in a meaningful way. I expect your "group of students" has a tutor/professor who can help you in this respect.
Joseph
Thomas, hi
I can only agree with the generous offerings here. There appear to be some interesting points in the questionnaire, but I think you will find that you end up with a low/nil response rate, to be very honest.
A couple of thoughts...
Questionnaire design might include asking one's self the following :
-aim: what is it you want to do?
-focus: what is the central issue?
-purpose: what do you hope to achieve?
these frame your overarching research question(s)
next... anaysis framework....to measure numbers or the analysis of words or both
then question types open/closed/mixed to fit the above rationale
The tool used to implement the above needs to support your answers to those questions.
hh
Dawn
Hello Dawn,
Thank you for your response. Our project is not a typical survey, but rather an "expert interview" with the community of Moodle being the expert.
- Aim: measure use and advantages of different groups using Moodle (therefore we did a classical survey with students and face-to-face expert interviews with lecturers as well)
- focus: use and advantages of moodle
- purpose: create one expert opinion of the community of Moodle; compare the findings with findings from the survey with students and expert interviews with lecturers (what are the use and advantages of Moodle according to the developers of Moodle/students/lecturers?)
I would really appreciate it, if you join our "expert interview". There you also find a more detailed explanation on the method by our tutor: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=253084
Best wishes,
Thomas
Thomas, I am happy to start the ball rolling and consider a response for all your questions. I really need to know your deadline date, in the first instance.
thanks
Dawn
Hi Dawn,
thank you so much. i'm writing directly from class. what's funny: i noticed your answers during our presentation.
the deadline for our paper is february 7th -which means we will consider answers provided until feb4 or 5...
best wishes from Vienna,
Thomas
Hello Joseph,
Thanks for your comment. The term "questionnaire" was indeed misleading here. It is rather an "expert interview" with the community of Moodle being the expert.
1. pirate pad includes a timeline-function. therefore, changes to the answers won't get lost, but will be considered in the interpretation.
2.+3. the questions would be too long if it's a typical survey. since it's an expert interview, the length of the questions is according to our tutor ok. The questions are meant to be of the "open" type. This interview is about opinions/expectations (qualitative method), a standardised questionnaire wouldn't make sense.
Please join our expert interview, I'd really appreciate it, since the end of the semester is coming closer. There's a new thread: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=253084
Best wishes
Thomas
Hi
http://piratepad.net/Ml5PyZkMN0 is giving, "Piratepad.net is having some difficulties at the moment but should be back on track soon! Please try again or wait for the timeout below.
An automatic restart of Piratepad will occur in -18394 seconds.
This page will automatically reload 1 minute and 34 seconds after Piratepad should've been restarted."
http://piratepad.net/front-page/ says, "If you have problems in loading pads, please clear your browser cache!" Not informative for me: a) What kind of problems? b) Also calling piratepad for the first time?
http://piratepad.net/Ml5PyZkMN0 is giving, "Piratepad.net is having some difficulties at the moment but should be back on track soon! Please try again or wait for the timeout below.
An automatic restart of Piratepad will occur in -18394 seconds.
This page will automatically reload 1 minute and 34 seconds after Piratepad should've been restarted."
http://piratepad.net/front-page/ says, "If you have problems in loading pads, please clear your browser cache!" Not informative for me: a) What kind of problems? b) Also calling piratepad for the first time?
I saw the question "pad". It is not a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Questionnaire, rather a series of essay type questions. The prefix "Open-Source" adds more to the confusion.
If you mean 'questionnaire' as understood by the Moodle community, there is the built-in module http://docs.moodle.org/en/Survey and an add-on, you guessed it, http://docs.moodle.org/en/Questionnaire. (Worth listening to Joseph ;)
Recently I was involved in a survey about usage habits of smart-phones in a college, comparing the opinion of pupils against teachers. As you can guess, it was a tricky one. We chose the Questionnaire add-on and launched the survey in a very short time. It worked very well.
If you mean 'questionnaire' as understood by the Moodle community, there is the built-in module http://docs.moodle.org/en/Survey and an add-on, you guessed it, http://docs.moodle.org/en/Questionnaire. (Worth listening to Joseph ;)
Recently I was involved in a survey about usage habits of smart-phones in a college, comparing the opinion of pupils against teachers. As you can guess, it was a tricky one. We chose the Questionnaire add-on and launched the survey in a very short time. It worked very well.
Hi Visvanath,
The term "questionnaire" is indeed misleading - according to our tutor we should rather call it an "expert interview", in this case the community of moodle developers being the expert. we worked on the questions as well, please find the link and further explanations here: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=253084
I'd really appreciate it if you help us with your answers.
Best wishes
Thomas
Hi Thomas
Since you personally requested, I took a shot. I hope a real expert will straighten it out!
;-D
Since you personally requested, I took a shot. I hope a real expert will straighten it out!
;-D
Visvanath, hi
it turns out, that I was able to think about my responses logically, due to what was there before me. So, it also turns out that you are a diamond-twas crystal clear! Thanks. Think we got it about right, but would be good to have other views too eh. Nice to know what others think, nice to have that type of dialogue.
warm wishes
Dawn
Thomas, hi
noticed you have made some adjustments. Might it be an idea to let everyone know your deadline? Date?
hope helpful
Dawn