Russell Stannard goes bananas over Survey Monkey.
As teachers, we often want to collect data from our students. For example, more and more we are expected to collect feedback after our classes or to produce surveys that help to build up a picture of our students’ needs and expectations for their course.
Teachers often get students to create surveys and questionnaires as language exercises, too. We might ask them to work in groups and create questionnaires about hobbies or opinions on certain topics. Such questionnaires are a useful way of helping the students to get to know each other at the start of a course. Once the students have done their surveys, they can report their findings to the rest of the class or even give a PowerPoint presentation.
Survey Monkey
One of the tools I like to use most for creating surveys and questionnaires is Survey Monkey. It has been around for a number of years now; it is very reliable and is popular with both teachers and students.
The entry-level tool is free and allows you to create up to ten questions. These can be answered by as many as 100 students – normally enough to cover even the biggest of classes. The variety of question types available is pretty impressive, and Survey Monkey will also analyse your data and provide graphs, percentages and summaries.
Although Survey Monkey is not designed for creating tests and quizzes, you can use it for these, as it allows multiple-choice questions, single-answer text questions, scales and ranking type questions and a number of other choices. You can even add pictures. Your tests can be shared online, so the students can do them at home after the lesson, as a way of checking understanding.
Where Survey Monkey really comes into its own, though, is for gathering data. This could be opinions, feedback, needs analysis, etc. You can include questions where the students can write their own answers as well as those that ask for specific answers. Survey Monkey can’t analyse long answers and produce graphs for you based on these, but it can reproduce all the answers to a question in such a way that you can easily read through them. Where specific answers to questions are provided, it can produce specific data in the form of graphs and percentages.
Teacher surveys
Survey Monkey can be a great way of collecting feedback about a course. The answers can be completely anonymous, and the fact that it is online means that the students don’t have to do it in class if you don’t have time. Once you have produced a questionnaire, you can share it very easily.
The first time I used Survey Monkey was on an MSc Multimedia and Education course, where I wanted to build up a picture of the experience of the 25 students who had just signed up. I used a variety of questions to help me collect data on the work the students had done previously, what software they knew and what courses they had taken, as well as what they were
hoping to learn on my course. I sent the link to the questionnaire to the students by email, but I also placed the link on the Blackboard site we were using. This was really helpful, and enabled me to gain a clearer idea about the students I was going to be working with.
I have also used Survey Monkey to gather data about my website and the people who use it. For the last four years, I have produced questionnaires that I have put on this website, trying to keep the questions similar so that I can compare the answers from year to year. So, for example, I have learnt that 26% of the people that use my website are teacher trainers, yet four years ago this number was only about 5%. A growing number, around 20%, don’t teach languages at all.
Student surveys
Using Survey Monkey is not difficult, and I like getting my students to create their own surveys. A lot of language processing takes place, both while the students work out how to create a survey and also in the production of the questions. With lower-level students, you can even allow them to change the interface so that the instructions and guidance are in their native language. Of course, not every language is available but about 15 languages are now covered. This doesn’t stop it being a useful language tool, since the questions the students produce will still be in English.
The best way to approach the activity is to give each group a topic on which to base their survey, eg the area where they live, use of the internet, multiculturalism, environmental policy, etc. Once the survey has been created, it is shared, so that the rest of the class can complete it.
You could make this a regular feature of your lessons: each week, one group creates a survey that the rest of the class completes. Presenting the findings can be good fun, as the students can use the graphs and percentage data as well as highlighting interesting comments and text.
Survey Monkey is also a tool that students might find very interesting in their future lives. Many of my MSc students have used it for gathering research data. The paid versions offer very sophisticated options, which make it useful to businesses, too. So as well as practising their language skills, the students are also developing their digital literacies.
Help videos for using Survey Monkey:
www.teachertrainingvideos.com/monkey/index.html
Russell Stannard is the founder of www.teachertrainingvideos.com, which won a British Council ELTons award for technology. He is a freelance teacher and writer and also a NILE Associate Trainer.
