How to create a Choice activity (poll)

This refers to Moodle 4.3 from August 2024 onwards

What is a Choice activity?

A Choice activity can be used to ask a single question, as a simple poll, or to enable students to register an interest or sign up for an option. It's probably the simplest possible option for adding some engagement or interactivity into a module.

Features include

• Choose one options, or multiple options.
• Limit number of responses allowed for each option.
• Allow students to update their choices or allow them only one.
• Choose whether to publish results to students immediately after they have answered, after a certain date, or not at all. Results may be published with student names or anonymously.
• It works on a first-come first-served basis.

Alternatively you can use the Signup Sheet activity or the Allocation Form activity (see links to help pages on these below).

Where would you use a Choice activity?

Examples of using Choice activities:

• Poll students at the beginning of a topic, and then again after they have studied the topic.
• Use poll before a lecture or seminar or during one to quickly test students' understanding.
• To facilitate student decision-making, for example allowing students to vote on a direction for the course or which topics to focus on in revision lectures.

How to create a Choice activity

To create a Choice:

1. Navigate to your course and click on the 'Edit mode' slider to enable editing.

2. In the section where you want to create your web page click on the Add an activity or resource hyperlink. 

3. This will open the activity picker. Click on the 'Choice' word to select this resource.

4. This will open a new page where you will need to enter a 'Choice name' and 'Description'. The 'Choice name' will appear on the main module page and this field must be completed and is the question that you would like to ask.

5. Under the Options heading, create at least one option (there are 5 options available by default, but more can be added). There are some other options in this section that relate to students making choices which are: 'Allow choice to be updated', 'Allow more than once choice to be selected' and 'Limit the number of responses allowed'.

6. Adjust any of the other settings (details below) and click on the 'Save and return to module' or 'Save and display' buttons when ready.

7. When you have finished, don't forget to disable editing by clicking on the 'Edit mode' slider to disable editing.

Other settings for Choice

'Limit the number of responses allowed' (under Options in settings) can be useful when using for sign-up against a selection of essay titles or tutorial groups. You then set the limit against each individual option so that when that limit is reached, no other participants can select that option.

'Publish results' can be adjusted in terms of whether or not they are published to participants. If you choose for results to be published, there are further options to anonymise these.

To view Choice results

Once students have started to complete the activity, you will want to be able to see how people have responded.

1. Open the Choice activity, making sure 'Edit mode' is disabled and click on the Responses tab along the top.

2. This will open the 'Responses' page where you can see how many people selected a particular options and see which students selected which options (if not anonymised).

3. There are also options beneath the table to download the response data into a range of formats including ODS, Excel and Text formats.

Similar resources

• Page:
  How to use the Signup Sheet Tool
• Page:
  How to Add an Allocation Form
• Page:
  How to create a Vote activity
• Page:
  How to create a Choice activity (poll)