Rollins has a site license for two survey tools, Microsoft Forms and Qualtrics, that you may use to create anonymous surveys for your students. While Canvas surveys are convenient, there are concerns about these being truly anonymous. The Canvas documentation states, “The anonymous option can be enabled or disabled before or after a survey has received submissions, allowing a user with sufficient permissions to see a student's identity and responses. To collect fully anonymous survey responses, you may want to use a third-party survey tool.”

Microsoft Forms

Microsoft Forms is a simple survey tool that allows you to create a survey with a variety of question types. MS Forms has a lower learning curve than Qualtrics and is a good tool to use to create simple surveys that don't require branching or other advanced features.
You have the option to make a survey in Microsoft Forms anonymous by selecting this setting when creating.

Directions to create and share a survey with Microsoft Forms:

Log in to https://forms.office.com/ using your Rollins email address.
Create a survey form
Make your survey form anonymous.
- Select More form settings , and then select Settings.
- Select anyone with the link can respond so students will not have to sign in.
  - This will also disable the record names function.
Share the survey form in Canvas
- Share a link to a Microsoft Form or get the embed code to embed the form in a Canvas Page
View your survey form results

Qualtrics

Qualtrics is a powerful survey tool with significantly more features than Microsoft Forms. As a result, the learning curve for Qualtrics is steeper than for Microsoft Forms.
Qualtrics surveys are anonymous if shared via an anonymous link and no personal identification questions are included in the survey.

Directions to create an anonymous Qualtrics survey:

1. Qualtrics can be accessed via Okta
2. Create a Qualtrics survey
3. Add Questions to your survey
4. Share your survey in Canvas or through email with a single reusable link
5. View your survey results

Using Anonymous Surveys to Collect Mid-Course Feedback from Students

Rather than waiting until the end of the semester CIEs, you can collect anonymous course feedback from your students early enough to give you time to see what's working, what's not, and what you can revise to improve the course. Below is a very common practice with some of Nancy Chick's adaptation to the typical questions.

Use the steps above for Microsoft Forms or Qualtrics, create an anonymous survey with the following open-ended questions (“Text” in MS Forms and “Text-Entry” in Qualtrics)--or adapt as you wish:

1. What’s helping you learn in this course?
2. What’s making learning difficult in this course?
3. What can I do to improve your learning experience in the course?
4. What can your classmates do to improve your learning experience in the course?
5. What can you do to improve your learning experience in the course?
6. Other comments:

After reading their responses, you can talk with students about the patterns you see, identifying what you (or they) can commit to doing and what you (or they) can’t -- and why.