Creating self-assessment items in Storymaps with Survey123

a "hackey" approach to improving storymaps for classrooms

In this third installment of examining self-assessment strategies in storymaps for learners, we’re going to see just how far we can push Survey123. We’ll combine three concepts to produce a reasonably elegant embedded self-assessment item.

•  A: Rules (available on Single Choice, Dropdown, Likert Scale and Rating questions)
• B: Design elements (e.g. color)
• C: URL parameters to control visibility.

And a HUGE thanks to  Peter Knoop . Without his brilliant effort, this post would have looked very different.

Also, you may find some of my previous attempts to  integrate Survey123 and Storymaps  useful.

Create a storymap for learners that includes periodic, multiple choice items placed throughout a storymap that a learner can interact with, in order to test their comprehension of material presented in the storymap. Self-assessments then should provide immediate feedback to the user about the correctness of a choice and why or why not the choice is valid. Self-assessment items don’t inherently require learner response data to be passed back to the learning management system. 

You can see two simple examples of Survey123 at work in storyamps. Peter created  this fine example  and then I began following his lead and  created this example .  Note the dynamic feedback for correct vs incorrect – and the inclusion of stylized text, links, and images in the feedback.

We’ll walk you through how my river example was created above.  For most educators, you’ll just want to repeat this process for each self-assessment item.  Don’t worry. After you create two or three, the process greatly speeds up.

.1. Go to Survey123, sign in, and create a new survey.

.2. Add an item of type, Single Choice.

.3. Create your self-assessment question with four responses (1 correct response).

.4. Add an item of type, Note. Repeat three additional times.  Each Note will provide the learner with feedback.  Increase or decrease note counts for more or less response options.

.5. Title the first note: Correct and include some descriptive feedback text.

.6. Title boxes two, three, and four as incorrect and include corrective feedback.  You may want the Note title to reference the specific response. It validates to the user which option they selected and makes it easier to set up the rules.

.7. Press the “Set rule” button, which appears when hovering over the question (Concept A).  Align each of your four responses to the proper Note you have created.

.8. Press Save.

.9. Under the Appearance button, set the design elements (Concept B):

• Turn off header, footer, and description.
• Set all background colors to white.
• Set all text colors to black.

These settings help the self-assessment item blend in with the default storymap theme. 

 .10. Publish.

.11. Under Collaborate, click Share Survey. For your first attempt, I recommend sharing your survey to Everyone (Public). Functionally, your Survey123 sharing permissions should match your Storymap.  For this demo, we’ll just set everything to public.

.12. Press Save.

.13. Copy your survey URL and paste it into a new browser window (ideally in private or Incognito mode). You’ll notice the “short URL” expands in the browser and looks something like:  https://survey123.arcgis.com/share/92169135a854419e9641810144d97e9b 

If your Appearance settings are correct, the survey looks pretty plain although a Submit button and navigation bar are visible. Let’s fix that.

.14. Paste your survey’s expanded URL into a word processor or text editor.

.15. Add the following to the end of your URL (Concept C):

?hide=submit,navbar

….giving you a URL that looks more like:  https://survey123.arcgis.com/share/92169135a854419e9641810144d97e9b?hide=submit,navbar  . and more importantly hides the submit button. Paste your new link in a browser and see the changes.

(Note: the string after “share” beginning 921…., is unique to the survey. Your survey id will be different.)

.16. Hold on to this URL because this is what we’ll use in the storymap. My example looks like the below.

We're going to assume you know the basics of building storymaps, if not there are many great free resources for learning more.

We'll focus on using the embed widget on the main storymap stage (not in a sidecar for example).

.1. Add an Embed widget.

.2. Paste the long URL (with additional "&hide=submit....." text). Press Save.

.3. Hover over your new embed and press the gear icon (Options).

• Turn off, "Include a button".
• Turn on, "Allow users to directly...."

.4. Add additional content as needed.

.5. Publish (to public).

.6. Test your new embedded self-assessment item in a private or Incognito browser.

You can create a new Survey123 survey for each new self-assessment item that you want to include in a storymap or you can add multiple self-assessment items to one survey. The bad news is that you might end up with a lot of Survey123 surveys or you'll have to add some extra URL parameters (Concept C) to hide the additional questions.

I prefer to keep all the questions for one storymap in one Survey123 and deal with the growing URL. In order to do this, you need to know and do two things:

.1. Get the field name for each self-assessment item in your survey. To get the field names, in Survey123, press the Publish button. The press "Modify Schema". You will need the exact text as it appears in the Name column - put only for the questions, not the answers. Copy and paste each field name into a text editor.

.2. Add each field name to your URL (example: &hide:field:pickAColor,field:pickADate, field:yourName). My full URL that includes two hidden field names now looks like:

 https://survey123.arcgis.com/share/92169135a854419e9641810144d97e9b?hide=submit,navbar,field:what_color_is_obsidian,field:hideme  (This URL hides my two unneccessary questions - one named 'hideme' and the other named 'what_color_is_obsidian'.)

That's it. Good luck! Comments or questions? Connect on this article in the Esri Community!

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