Quercus surveys can be a handy tool for collecting student feedback. However, if you would like the feedback to be anonymous, they are not the best option. That is because Quercus surveys can be de-anonymized by members of the teaching team after responses are collected.
In order to get a truly anonymous response, we recommend using Microsoft Forms with the below settings selected.
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1. Access Microsoft Forms
- Go to https://forms.office.com/
- If you are not logged into your U of T O365 account, you will be prompted to enter your UTORid and password
- Go to Office.com or any O365 app on the web.
- Select the waffle icon on the top-left corner of the screen.
- Select Forms from the list of applications.
2. Set your form to collect anonymous responses
After building out the elements of your form, you can define settings for your form (set it to collect anonymous responses) and share it to those who will be filling it out.
If you are using this survey to hold a class vote, you might consider using your options to allow students two choices that you can live with, versus a "yes/no" vote. This will hopefully save you a round of voting and ensure that the option selected is one that works for you.
- Select Collect responses in the top right corner of your screen.
- Select radio button for Only people in my organization can respond. This setting provides anonymity but still requires authentication. Form creators will not be able to see this information, so it remains anonymous.
- De-select Record name and select One response per person. You likely want to prevent any misuse from students submitting a response more than once.
You can see that the results are anonymized, as in this example results page, which shows the entries in the 'Name' column left blank and the entries in the 'Email' column as 'anonymous':
3. Share your form to your Quercus course (or otherwise)
After building out the elements of your form, you can share it to those who will be filling it out.
- Select whether you want to share the form via URL, send it via email, share a QR code or via embed code. In this example sharing via URL is demonstrated.
- Select Copy link to copy the URL for pasting into your communication.