Overview

TOIA's ability to deal with Surveys (opinion gathering questionnaires) as opposed to Assessments has been shown to have many weaknesses. These are:

1. Nomenclature - There is insufficient consistency in the naming of survey related features. E.g. In Assessment type you have to choose type "Survey" but the schedules are referred to as "Non-authenticated".
2. Scoring - Mandatory scoring of every question in TOIA forces a survey author to enter dummy scores which then show up in the reports.
3. Reports - There are a couple of problems with the reporting of surveys:
   a. Showing scores when not required
   b. Unable to view Essay responses on the same page as the other answers
       - You have to click a link to see just those answers
4. No support for exporting data - It should be possible to export the answers for analysis in Excel in order to perform statistical calculations.

Proposal

Perhaps the weaknesses in the survey handling features stem from a former lack of the TOIA project making it clear that "Surveys" are not the same as "Non-authenticated assessments".

Surveys are used in teaching to gather data from students regarding their views on the teaching and therefore do not require to have any marks assigned to them. They could, however, be authenticated OR non-authenticated.

Non-authenticated assessments are useful for publishing Quizzes on a system for formative assessment and no TOIA login account is required. This is very useful for plugging Quizzes into any website.

Approaches to resolving this issue are outlined below.

1. Naming strategy. No longer should "Non-authenticated" and "Survey" be used as if they are the same. This implies that we need 1 new menu item in "Schedules" called "Non-authenticated surveys".

   NOTE: The menu options under the Schedule area are presently a little hard to understand. We have "Manage schedules" which suggests all schedules are managed via that option whereas only Assessment schedules go there. The order should (if possible) be re-arranged to:

   Schedules
   Authenticated assessments
   Non-authenticated assessments
   Non-authenticated surveys
   Publish
   Etc
   and have Search at the end

2. Scoring. This needs to be addressed at the Question level. The idea is to be able to say "This question doesn't need a score". This could be implemented as a check box in the Answer tab of a question. If the checkbox is ticked, then no validation should be done on the scoring.
   
   
3. Reports. The "Survey Response Analysis Report" is excellent. It aggregates responses to the questions with options and summarises them. All that we need now are 2 other reports:

   a) One that collates all the Essay questions (Survey free-text answer report) and answers which should be of the format, maybe:
   
   Student name 1      Essay question 1     Essay Answer 1
                                Essay question 2      Essay Answer 2

   Student name 2      Essay question 1     Essay Answer 1
                                Essay question 2      Essay Answer 2

   Etc

   b) A Survey detailed report, which is like the Non-authenticated detailed report, with no scores showing obviously.

4. Exporting answers for loading into Excel. Perhaps not in the theme of QTI, but the ability to move Survey data into Excel is very valuable and if a CSV could be constructed from the answers, it would be excellent.

Conclusion

The "wish-list" of improvements to the Survey handling has been specified. The TOIA Project has some funds to allocate to this work and following a suitable agreement with ExcelSoft, the project would commission the work and pay for as many of the changes as they can.

Addendum

The above changes imply that there is scope for "Authenticated surveys", however that can be addressed later if sufficient demand is noted.