This tutorial will walk you through how to create a poll and add it to a page in your course. It will also suggest different ways to use it in order to enhance online teaching and learning.

What are the Basic Features?

Polls allows a faculty member to create a multiple-choice poll and embed it within online course content. Students participate in the poll, which can be one question or many. Both faculty and students can easily view the results from within the page. Polls are not tied to grades and are anonymous. It’s simply a tool to increase engagement and awareness for both faculty and students.

What are some different ways to use Polls?

For a simple tool, Polls can be used in many different, effective ways.

• Check for prior knowledge: Ask a question in the beginning of the unit which allows you to gauge where learners are. This would be ideal if the content often includes common misconceptions.
• Check for understanding: Ask a question about the core content to see if students are “getting it”.
• Give them a voice in direction of course content: “Which author should we read next: Dr. A or Dr. B?”
• Debate: “Which theory makes a stronger case: A or B?”
• Encourage self-assessment: “What grade would you give yourself on the last assignment?”
• Make study habits more apparent: “How much time did you spend preparing for the exam?”
• Gather feedback on your course: “Which assignment did you find encouraged your learning the most?”
• Just having fun: “Best study spot: Library or Tech Commons?”

While not a requirement, debriefing the Poll results after the poll ends is highly recommended. For instance, an Announcement could be posted the next week in which the faculty member remarks on how many students voted a particular way.

Creating a Poll

You can create a poll in any part of your online course which has a rich content editor (Pages, Announcements, Discussions, Assignments, Quizzes, Syllabus).

1. Click the drop-down arrow in the rich content editor when in Edit mode.
2. Select Polls from the drop-down menu.
   
   
3. A pop-up will open with a list of the polls you have already created. If you haven’t created any polls yet, your only option will be to create a new poll.
4. Click the Create New Poll button.
5. The new poll window has two primary areas: question and choices.
   
   
6. Enter both the question and possible choices in the appropriate fields.
7. If you scroll underneath the choices area, you can add additional choices. Click Add Choice to add an additional choice.
   
   
8. A new box will show up as a new choice. You can remove additional choices by clicking the delete button (the button marked by an X).
9. When you’re done entering choices, click Finish. You’ll then be presented with the poll detail page, which displays a preview of the poll.
   
   
10. Click Insert Poll to insert the poll into the page content or Edit Poll if you want to make additional changes.
11. Once the poll is entered into the page, ensure you name the page and click Save.
12. After saving the page, if you want to try the poll, you can make a selection and click Vote.
13. After voting, you will see the current results of the poll.
    
    

Editing a Poll

1. 1. While editing the page within Webcourses@UCF, go back to the Polls option in the rich text editor (Follow steps 1 & 2 from above).
   2. Since you’ve created a poll, you will now see it in the list of polls. To edit the poll, click on the poll name.
      
      

Clicking the poll will take you to the poll details page. To view current results, click View Results. To edit the poll, click Edit Poll. If you have already inserted the poll into the page once, you do not have to insert it again.

Clicking on View Results, you can see the current vote values on each of the choices. As you can see, the vote registered earlier is showing up here.

Considerations

• At the moment, polls do not import from one course section to another.
• Poll results do not tie to the Gradebook.
• Votes are anonymous.
• A student can vote multiple times.