Surveys and Self Assessments in Brightspace

Assess student progress in a low-stakes setting through Surveys and Self Assessment in Brightspace. Surveys and Self Assessments are excellent tools that enable learners to provide feedback on how well they think they are doing with course material. Surveys and self assessments are not graded in Brightspace, making them a low-stakes activity to assess how effective the course was at meeting learning objectives. As a reflective tool, instructors can utilize surveys to gauge abilities as an instructor, the relevance of course materials, and the student experience as a whole in the class.

Surveys and Self Assessments

Brightspace offers a variety of formative and summative assessment tools. Choosing the correct tool such as surveys, self-assessments, or quizzes can benefit the students as well as instructor.

Choosing an Assessment Tool

For assistance on choosing the right assessment tool, please request Instructional Support from The Office of Curriculum, Assessment and Teaching Transformation.

Creating a Survey

Surveys are an excellent way to solicit feedback from participants regarding any aspect of a course. You can gather anonymous or non-anonymous opinions and information from users. Unlike quizzes, survey questions do not require right or wrong answers and Likert-style rating questions are possible. Create surveys and use the statistics tools to monitor current course trends, seek opinions and assess user satisfaction.

In the navbar, click Assessments and then Surveys.
Click New Survey.
In the Properties window, provide the survey with a Name and any of the following options:
- Add your survey to a Category. Associating a category with a survey allows surveys to be grouped by category in the survey list page.
- Allow for Instant Feedback or not. If you elect to provide instant feedback, it will remove the Submit option from a non-editable survey. Any feedback entered for a question is instantly available to a user taking the survey.
- Allow for Anonymous Results. This option suppresses the display of any user data in survey results. Individuals who can review survey results will be able to see answers without any association to the individual who submitted the response. Once this option is selected, it is not reversible.
  - Please note: A survey cannot be made anonymous if it has any release conditions or if any release conditions are ever created using the survey as one of the conditions.
- Add/Edit Survey Questions.
  - Please note: this will take you to the Question Library.
- Add a Description/Submission Message.
- Add a Page Footer.
In the Restrictions window, choose any of the following options:
- Hide survey from users.
- Set your survey's availability.
- Attach release conditions.
- Set the number of attempts a student is allowed.
- Set special access and add students to the special access established.
In the Objective window, you may associate the survey to learning objectives of your course.
In the Reports Setup window, you may create a report for the survey results. To create a report, click New Report and Name your report. Then choose any of the following options:
- Report type (summary of all surveys or individual attempts).
- When to Release the survey (immediately or on a specific date).
- Who to Release the Report to.
- Please note: You must click Save in order for your report settings to save.
Click Save and Close when finished.

Creating a Self Assessment

Self assessments are a formative assessment tool that can provide learners with immediate feedback on their responses to a series of questions. They can also be used to make sure that they are deepening their knowledge and confidence with respect to the course and material through reflective learning and course material comprehension. In addition to being able to receive feedback on their own performance, students can help instructors identify areas of improvement.

Self Assessments can utilize the same questions that are available in the question library. It can be used interchangeably with other assessment tools such as Quizzes, Surveys, and Self Assessments. Questions can also be equipped with hints and feedback to help improve content comprehension. In some types of questions, you can provide additional feedback on the details that instructors are looking for in an answer.

Students’ answers are not saved and cannot be reviewed after the self-assessment has been completed, so it is important that feedback be added to each question before the learner takes the self-assessment. Students can see the answer feedback immediately after answering the question and the overall feedback after completing the self-assessment. Self-assessments are available for learners to take as many times as needed and there are no start and end dates. Release conditions are also not available for self-assessments.

In the navbar, click Assessments and then Self Assessments.
Click New Self Assessment.
Create the assessment:
- Enter a Name.
- Select a Category.
- Decide whether or not to allow hints or shuffle questions at the self assessment level.
- Add a Page Header/Footer.
Click Save and Close to finish and return to the Self Assessment page or Save to save your progress.