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Survey best practices

Structure tests and surveys so survey responses are captured in CourseMill and can be reported.

If your learning content has both tests and surveys in the same assignable unit (AU), separating the survey responses from the test responses in CourseMill can be difficult. This article describes how to structure your content so that survey responses are captured and can be reported.

The problem

If you built your learning content in either of the following ways, your students get credit for taking the course, but responses to the survey questions are not seen in CourseMill:

  • The completion status is updated in your course before the survey takes place.
  • The student chooses to exit at the end of the test but before the survey. The LMS compares the Mastery Score (the SCORM lowest passing score) to the student's score upon exiting the course.

Best practice

Place the survey content in a separate AU to force the user to take your survey.

If you service a library of courses and want the same survey for each or most of them, make a separate course with your content tool (such as Lectora or Snap!) just for your survey. You can then copy the unpublished course files and customize your sample survey for each course.

Set the completion status

In your authoring tool, set the lesson completion status on the last page after the survey, which might be a "Thanks for taking my survey" page. In Lectora, this page is defined in Survey Properties > When Completed tab.

Important: Once the lesson completion status is set to completed, passed, or failed, no new information is written to the LMS. This includes interaction data.

Create the course in CourseMill

  1. Publish the course and the survey in CourseMill as two different courses.
  2. Edit the survey's prerequisites and set the course as a prerequisite to the survey. This ensures the user takes the course before giving feedback on it. See Editing course details.
  3. Add both courses into a curriculum. Make sure the course is first in the list by using the up and down keys next to the list. See Editing curriculum details.

The curriculum is now ready for user enrollment.

Report on the interactions

With this course structure, interactions are easy to report on. Interactions, located in the Reports menu, provides the detailed survey response information. The CourseMill admin, or a reporter/instructor assigned to the course or curriculum, can view the survey data.

To get a report that includes both course and survey responses, run the interaction report by selecting each of the courses separately, or select both courses by using the CTRL key. To see the detail, clear the Summary Statistics check box.

Note: Before an interactions report can be run on both, at least one student account must take both the course and the survey. If you click Select to select an item and no items appear, that interaction data does not exist yet because no student has created any interactions.

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