We are testing the use of Moodle to allow for campus elections. Does anyone have any experience with this?
We set up four "courses" (one for each class) and enrolled eligible students via uploadusers (pulled a list of creditload=>12 and hours earned of the appropriate value). We used an anonymous choice for each office and put the links up on the front page of the site.
It is not very complicated, but I am wondering if anyone has a story to tell about a similar effort!
I am managing the vote tally myself, so that it will remain anonymous. I planned to export the file at the end of the voting period, strip the names, and then combine the vote totals from each class.
Anything to watch out for??
Thanks,
atw
We started voting on the class officers today. This is the second part of the election.
Observations:
Students cast quite a few ballots over moodle, despite the fact that the electronic vote was not the official vote. At this time we are running paper ballots also, so it is hard to say which way the students like better.
I saw that the choice does not tally the votes unless you allow students to view it after the poll is closed and look at it as a student. That might have been fixed or is still a bug, so I need to go check the tracker on that. I did not want students to view results as there was a possibility that the paper votes (which were official) might contradict the electronic votes, and also because I did not want to influence the voting as it progressed. So in the end, to count the votes, I either had to hide the course and then change the settings or count by tapping the screen! Either way was not optimal!
We had a problem with the senior class election because I did not have a good way to allow the seniors who will NOT be graduating in May to vote on the senior candidates for next year. I will have to figure that out. If you have any tricky things like that (and at a university, classification is always tricky!) you will have to think through the queries you use prior to enrolling the right students into the right course.
So I will be interested to see if the student government wants to go all electronic next year or resume paper balloting. They were worried about people not being able to log in, but on the other hand, having to physically cast a ballot at the campus center is also a barrier to some students.
That is the end of the story!
atw
Observations:
Students cast quite a few ballots over moodle, despite the fact that the electronic vote was not the official vote. At this time we are running paper ballots also, so it is hard to say which way the students like better.
I saw that the choice does not tally the votes unless you allow students to view it after the poll is closed and look at it as a student. That might have been fixed or is still a bug, so I need to go check the tracker on that. I did not want students to view results as there was a possibility that the paper votes (which were official) might contradict the electronic votes, and also because I did not want to influence the voting as it progressed. So in the end, to count the votes, I either had to hide the course and then change the settings or count by tapping the screen! Either way was not optimal!
We had a problem with the senior class election because I did not have a good way to allow the seniors who will NOT be graduating in May to vote on the senior candidates for next year. I will have to figure that out. If you have any tricky things like that (and at a university, classification is always tricky!) you will have to think through the queries you use prior to enrolling the right students into the right course.
So I will be interested to see if the student government wants to go all electronic next year or resume paper balloting. They were worried about people not being able to log in, but on the other hand, having to physically cast a ballot at the campus center is also a barrier to some students.
That is the end of the story!
atw
Vote to get totals added to the instructor and admin views for choices:
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-9666
atw
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-9666
atw