Viewing the results of the Survey XBlock - Appsembler
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Viewing the results of the Survey XBlock

There are essentially two steps to viewing and understanding the results of a Survey/Poll XBlock. First is generating the report; second is interpreting it. Here are the steps to doing both of those things.

Generating a report of responses

The following process is how you might generate a report of learner responses to a particular problem. Say, for if you wanted to see how many learners guessed a particular wrong answer in a multiple choice question. It works the same for the survey/poll XBlock.

  1. First, locate the survey in the LMS (Learning Management System)
  2. Click STAFF DEBUG INFO staff debug info
  3. Copy the problem location. This is the key that starts with “block” and ends with a string of random numbers and letters. problem location
  4. Go to the Instructor Dashboard by either clicking the Instructor item in the header or by adding “/instructor” to the end of your course URL instructor header item
  5. Navigate to the Data Download tab data download tab
  6. Scroll down until you see the text “To generate a CSV file that lists all student answers to a given problem…” There will be a field below this text labeled Problem location:. Paste the location in this field, then click the button below, which reads Download a CSV of problem responses 
  7. Depending on how much data is in your survey – it will take Open edX anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to generate the report. If it’s a small amount of data, simply wait a couple of seconds, then refresh the page. 
  8. Once your report is available, it will appear under the Reports Available for Download. Simply click on the report to download it. 

Interpreting the response report for the Survey XBlock

  1. Opening the csv file will display something like this: csv-unedited
  2. Because in this case, the title, location, and block_key are all the same for each row, I’ll usually remove those columns to simplify the report. Then you’re left with something like this: simplified report
  3. The state column contains all of the info we’re really interested in, and really the only important part is everything that happens within the brackets after “choices”
  4. Within those brackets we see something like this:
    “choices”: {“enjoy”: “Y”, “learn”: “Y”, “1564688652693”: “M”, “recommend”: “1564688564324”}
  5. This is the code that Open edX has generated for reporting the results of these surveys. Each question has an identifier (“enjoy” / “learn”) as does each response (“Y” / “M”) 
  6. So the pattern we see is “question1”: “response1”, “question2”: “response2” etc… Now all we have to do is decipher the identifiers.
  7. “enjoy” / “learn” / and “recommend” are the identifiers for the default questions that exist when a Survey component is put into a course. There is no way to change these in Studio, so when you edit the questions with your own content, the identifier will remain exactly as they are. The same goes for the default responses: “Y” / “M” / “N”
  8. For new questions and responses added beyond the three defaults, Open edX will create a randomly generated string of numbers to be the identifier.
  9. To find what each identifier corresponds to, we need to go back to the LMS and open the STAFF DEBUG INFO panel again. staff debug info again
  10. Find the section labeled questions. Here you’ll see some brackets with a lot of seemingly random data. Because we can’t scroll horizontally within the Staff Debug Info panel, we’ll need to copy/paste this info somewhere else. If you triple click, you’ll be able to highlight all of the information, which you can then copy to your clipboard. question-data
  11. Next, paste this information somewhere you can clearly see all of it. I’ll use the spreadsheet where we have our data. questions-identifiers-full
  12. By spreading this out a bit, we can see that there are some guiding organizational principles here. Namely, each set of brackets includes the key to what identifier corresponds with which question. question identifiers clearer
  13. Now we can see that `enjoy` is the identifier for our question `Did you have fun taking his course?`
  14. If we go back the Staff Debug Info panel we can see that there is a similar section for learner responses called answers where we can repeat the process. staff debug answers
  15. Pasting into our spreadsheet we can see this: response identifiers
  16. Here we can clearly see that ‘Y’ equates to ‘Absolutely’ and ‘N’ equates to ‘No Way’
  17. From this point you are free to manipulate the data how you see fit.
    1. For example, you can manually make your spreadsheet look a little more appealing by adding columns and inputting the proper value names. 
    2. You could also use a Find & Replace function to quickly make everything under the state column more readable.