Reviewed: 06/12/2019

SelectSurvey is on online tool for creating surveys and questionnaires (NOT assessments). Members of staff and Final Year eLearning project student are permitted the ability to create these surveys with their standard University username and password. If your access does not appear to let you create assessments, please contact the FBMH eLearning team.

The surveys that you create can be given to anyone with access to a computer, these users do not need to have an account on SelectSurvey in order to answer your surveys. If you need your surveys to require logging in to complete it (you need accurate data about which University of Manchester user has taken your survey), then you must select one of the appropriate settings in the survey options.

To access SelectSurvey

– Go to https://apps.mhs.manchester.ac.uk/surveys/Default.aspx

– Read the welcome screen and click the link that takes you to the log in page, then log in using your University username and password.

Navigating in SelectSurvey

You will not require most of the buttons/information that is available to you in SelectSurvey, however this guide will cover a few of them.

Surveys: This button will always take you back to your SelectSurvey front page with a list of your surveys.

Libraries: This page allows you to manage a library of questions that you may wish to make available in multiple surveys.

Templates: This page allows you to manage your survey templates. This is useful if you wish to create multiple surveys with a set visual design.

Email Lists: This page allows you to manage email lists for sending out surveys.

Reports: This page allows you to look at the analysis and reports for your surveys.

Create New Survey: This button will allow you to create a survey from scratch or from an existing template/copy of an existing survey.

Manage/Open/Close: This button will allow you to automatically open or close your survey, however the survey must be ready to deploy when you do this (including appropriate open/close dates in the survey settings), otherwise your users won’t be able to access the questions within the survey.

Status: This tells you whether your survey is currently in design/closed/open mode.

Title: The name of your survey, if you wish to preview your survey you can click this link.

Design: Once you have a survey, you can click this button to create/edit your survey.

Options: This button will allow you to set open/close dates, which users can access the survey as well as other settings for the behaviour of the survey.

Analyse: This button becomes available when you have user responses, it allows you to look at the responses and get statistics.

Export: This button allows you to export data when users have completed your survey.

Archive: This allows you to archive your survey once you have finished with it. You will need to archive a survey before it can be deleted.

Delete: This allows you to delete an archived survey.

Clear: This button allows you to delete the data from a survey.

 

Creating your Survey

To create a new survey, click the “Create New Survey” button, give your survey a title and choose whether to create from scratch of an existing survey (if applicable). Click Save.

From now on you can access and edit your survey by clicking the design button on the survey home page.

Creating questions:

When you have entered your survey, you create a new question by clicking the “insert” button on the right hand side.

You have many options that you can choose from in the drop down menu. For basic multiple answer survey questions, select the option “Choice – One Answer (Option Buttons)”.

Items with a prefix of “Presentation” are the options you use that are not based on individual questions but are more about how the questionnaire looks.

Here are several question types that are available:

Choice questions: there are several types of choice questions, the important thing to note when you are using these types of questions are the differences between “option” buttons and “checkboxes”. Checkboxes allow a user to choose several options from a list, whereas the “Option” question types only allow a single answer to be chosen.

Choice – one answer (option buttons)

Choice – multiple answer (Checkboxes)

Matrix questions allow you to create several similar questions (that are scale based) within a single question by creating a question table (see image below)

Matrix – Multiple Answers per Row (Checkboxes)

Open ended questions allow the user to make a free choice of answer, whether it be a date, a single line of text or a large comment.

 

Editing your Survey’s Properties/Options

Once you have questions you will want to tell your Survey how to behave. You do this by clicking the “Options” button, next to the survey on the front page. This gives you several categories of options to look at that you need to ensure are correct before you deploy your survey. Make sure that you read all the options before saving.

Status (General tab)

The Status of your survey will initially be in “Design” while you build it. Once you’re ready to release it, you should change this to “Open” and once it should be switched off you should change this to “Closed”. This status will be reflected on your home page.

Dates (General tab)

A survey will only be accessible to your users between the start and end dates, therefore you must ensure that these dates are accurate at all times. If you set your end date to 1st May, the users will lose access at 00:00 on 1st May, therefore their last access will be 23:59 30th April. Keep this in mind when setting your end date to ensure you don’t cut off access 24 hours before you intended.

Access tab

There are several types of access levels that you can choose and you must ensure that you get these options right. Failure to choose the correct Access Level will result in your users being unable to access your Survey.

In many cases, the users that you are giving your survey to will not have a Select Survey account, therefore you should choose “Anonymous” for authentication. You must then choose how many times a user is allowed to complete your Survey.

Survey Completion Properties (Completion tab)

These properties are designed to allow you to control what happens when one of your users complete your survey.

You have the option to:

– Customise a message

– Send the user to a online resource or website

– Close the Survey

 

Things to remember about SelectSurvey

Select Survey is not a questionnaire software, therefore it does not give users marks, or feedback to your users.

Once a survey has been answered by a user, (including yourself), you can no longer edit the questions. This is a feature to ensure data quality, as your responders would not approve of you changing the questions after they have responded (therefore possibly changing their answers and falsifying data). To edit your questions after a user has attempted you first need to “clear” all responses.

Clearing responses will clear all your user data from the system, resetting it. Be careful not to delete your responses by mistake.