There could be several reasons why you might need a form on your Moodle™ site. Forms in Moodle simplify many tasks for your e-Learning program in one go.
To be fair, having a one-on-one conversation with your students to pull feedback is great. But is it feasible to conduct such sessions frequently? OR does every student have the time and urge to share the feedback information with you?
Of course, this might be possible if you have enough time at your disposal or if you have a small volume of data to handle. But given the amount of work you have as a Moodle teacher, it makes sense to automate a few of the crucial tasks with handy Moodle tools.
All in for convenience with Forms
What best option do you have when it comes to collecting huge volumes of data from your e-Learning audience in Moodle? The straightforward answer to this question is “Forms in Moodle”. It gives you the ability to control the type of information you collect from your students.
And the best part is, it is always more convenient for your students to fill out a simple form rather than answering open-ended questions that would take up a lot of time.
Why are FORMS in Moodle™ Important?
Forms on your Moodle site can get plenty of work done for you. They save resources, money, and most importantly TIME. Here are some of the tasks that forms can simplify for you on your Moodle site:
- Automatic student enrollment/registration
- Override Moodle Login page
- Collect basic student information before a quiz
- Collect feedback after a class or a quiz
- Ensure key course guidelines and the line-up of activities for the newly enrolled learners are provided via induction forms or checklists
Great quality forms have been successfully built and embedded by over 2000 Moodlers using Edwiser Forms. We have also written articles in the past on creating different types of forms in Moodle.
In this article, you will learn how to create yet another form type to enhance your course orientation for the new course enrollees.
Importance of student induction
Student induction is crucial as it gives an objective view of your e-learning program to your students. This way, students know what to expect and be prepared for the course without any anxiety.
The primary goal of induction is to help your new students settle in and get to grips with the entire Moodle course. Also, it’s a golden opportunity for you to highlight the best bits of your e-Learning program and foster better learning among newcomers on your Moodle site.
Why is it important to have an induction form
With effective induction forms, you can provide key course guidelines and the line-up of activities for the newly enrolled learners.
Think of it as specialized feedback after the initial orientation of the students before getting started with the actual course program.
The idea is to keep checking in with your new enrollees to make sure they’re settling in comfortably without feeling overburdened or confused. The more supported your students feel, the quicker they’ll start to become productive and engage better with your learning initiatives.
So, go ahead and make your students feel welcomed. Be a teacher that encourages and values students’ opinion.
Creating a student induction form in Moodle
Now coming to the practical part! You can easily create high-quality induction forms with Edwiser Forms Pro. And guess what? You can save your coding expertise for another time and task. Because you don’t need any code development knowledge to build forms in Moodle with Edwiser Forms.
To make things simpler, we have a short skimmable guide for you. Here’s how to create a basic rating-based induction form using Edwiser Forms.
Without further ado, let’s begin
A step-by-step guide to creating induction forms in Moodle
Once you have installed and configured Edwiser Forms. Click on Edwiser Forms in the left navigation bar
Click on Add New Form
Select the form template of your choice. We are opting for the Blank Form in this case.
In the General tab, add an appropriate title and description for your form and assign a date range and time for form completion. In this case, it ensures that the new students fill up the induction form within 7 days of completing the induction process. You can tweak the deadlines as per your requirements.
Go to the Notification tab and check Enable notification to make sure you receive an email whenever a student submits the induction form. Next, you create an email subject of your choice for added convenience and clarity.
Go to the Confirmation tab and set an appropriate email subject to confirm form submission. The students will receive this email on the successful submission of the induction form.
In the Events tab, you can select the required event that will automatically take place after the induction form is submitted. In this case, we want the newly registered students to get auto-enrolled into the course post successful form submission. Once the induction form is submitted, the students will be taken to course enrollment.
Choose the course program you want the student to get enrolled in and click on Save Changes
Once the initial settings are done, go to the Fields tab to start editing the induction form. You can change the layout, add standard or advanced fields and even add HTML elements from the collapsible menu on the right-hand side
To begin with, add a standard field called Textarea for collecting the name of the students as well as the concerned instructor’s name depending on the course.
You can directly edit the added fields by clicking on the pencil icon (The 3rd icon that says -Edit field properties/options when you hover on it) from the list of icons against the field.
While editing the fields, make sure you mark the mandatory fields as Required* by checking the Required box.
The next field intends to collect student email addresses. Edwiser Forms provides a standard field to directly add an email ID field in the form. Simply click on email under the standard fields and it gets automatically included in the form.
Now it’s time to add a dropdown list of courses for the students to choose from. Simply choose Select under the standard fields. You can directly edit the multiple options to be added in the dropdown list same as how you edited the Name field (Pencil shaped icon for editing).
In this example, we’ve added 5 courses – course 1, course 2, course 3, course 4, course 5 as shown in the image below.
To create the field name collecting the name of the course teacher/instructor, you can follow the same process as the Student Name field. Next, in order to create a break in the form, we’ve used the Separator HTML element. The Paragraph element is then used to add a little information about the induction form before the students can start filling it up.
The induction form has questions asking the students to rate the individual activities or sub-activities of the process on a scale of 1 to 5. Click on the RadioGroup option from the list of standard fields to create the rating or score-based questions one by one.
The individual options or the radio button labels can be customized as per your needs. Since we need a scale of 1 to 5 here, we will edit accordingly. Simply navigate to the Options tab and make the required changes.
Moreover, the students can even give detailed responses and point out specific things about the induction process in the Additional Comments section. This is also created using a simple standard field that is, Textarea.
Repeat the same process of placing RadioGroups in the form for adding questions one below the other. You could add as many questions as you want to.
Don’t forget to hit Save Changes before you close or preview the form. The Submit button has been embedded in all types of Edwiser forms by default.
Remember – For the form to get saved and work perfectly, make sure you assign a name in the attribute section of every field present in the form. The name can be anything for your reference and does not interfere with the look and feel of the form.
And there you have it! That’s how you create a simple induction form/checklist for your school, college, university, or company.
Conclusion
We hope this article helped you create an effective induction form on your Moodle website. Be assured, we’re always here to make sure your form building journey in Moodle is super-smooth.
We’d love to know what other forms types can be created. If you like, we can even come up with a similar guide for creating other Moodle forms of your choice. Just let us know in the comments below. We will try our best to give you the best possible solution!
On a side note, feel free to check out Edwiser Forms Pro to further expand your form creating capabilities in Moodle.
