Surveys and Self Assessments

Surveys and self assessments are not graded in UB Learns, making them a low-stakes activity to assess how effective the course is at meeting learning objectives and allowing students to provide feedback. 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.

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This guide will focus on Surveys and Self Assessments. For more information about quizzes, please see Quizzes in Brightspace.

Surveys and Self Assessments

UB Learns 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 with 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.

  1. On the navbar, click Assessments and select Surveys.
  2. Click New Survey. 
  3. Enter a name in Name.
  4.  Select 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.
    • Add a Description/Submission Message.
    • Add a Page Footer.
  5. In the Restrictions window, select 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.
  6. 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. 
  7. Click Save and Close.

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 student 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 students to take as many times as needed, and there are no start and end dates. Release conditions are also not available for self assessments. 

  1. On the navbar, click Assessments and select Self Assessments.
  2. Click New Self Assessment.
  3. Enter a name in Name.
  4. Click no category and select a category from the Category drop-down menu if necessary. You can also click add category to create a new one.
  5. Click the checkbox next to allow hints if necessary.
  6. Click the checkbox next to Shuffle questions at the self assessment level if necessary.
  7. Click Save.
  8. Click Add/Edit Questions.
  9. Create your questions in the Question Library.
  10. Click the checkboxes next to the questions you want to add to the self assessment.
  11. Click Done Editing Questions.
    • Important: The questions will not be visible on the Edit Self Assessment page.
  12. ClickSave and Close.
  13. Click the chevron icon next to the self assessment and select Preview.
    • The questions will be visible.
  14. Click Exit Preview.