Making a Choice

The Choice activity is a flexible and powerful tool for gathering feedback from students. Adding choices to each section of your course can give additional points of interactivity to the overall course. Here is how to set it up.

With editing turned on in your course, open the Add and activity or resource menu in the section of the course where you want to add a Choice. Select Choice in the Activities list and click Add.

Activity menu detail

You must add a Choice name - this is what you want students to choose. It's helpful to keep this fairly short. If you need more explanation, add that under the Description. The Description is not required, but will be displayed on the choice's page when students make their selection.

Settings page detail

In the Options section of settings, first choose how to manage the choice with three settings (default for each is No):

  • Allow choices to be updated - set this to Yes if you want students to be able to change their responses after making their choice
  • Allow more than one choice to be selected - set this to Yes if students will be able to answer the choice with more than one option
  • Limit the number of responses allowed - set this to Yes if you want to have a limited number of students than can pick each individual response
Options section of settings page

Below, enter the actual choices in the blank fields. You can have any number of choices. Any fields you leave blank will not appear to students. If you need more than the default 6, click Add three field(s) to form.

Choice fields on settings page

If you want to restrict the time period in which students can make choices, enable the "from" and "until" date fields under Availability. (These are disabled by default.) Once enabled, choose start and end dates/times for your Choice.

availability section on settings

In the Results section, you can select options under the Publish Results menu that let students see the results of their choices or not.

If you choose one of the options that publish results to students, you are given an additional option whether to make those results anonymous or to list them with student names.

Results section on settings

After reviewing all your settings, click Save and display at the bottom of the page to preview how your choice will appear.

Save and display button

On the choice page, you will see the actual choice as students will see it. Once students respond, you will see their results via a chart below. On the right is a link to a page that lists student responses by choice.

Choice page

The responses page lists the student names under their choices. You can export the data from this page via the export buttons below the chart.

Choice responses page