Online forms are a great tool to quickly gather data about large groups of people, and are a versatile tool that can be used for many purposes. Are you trying to learn more about the needs of your customers? Online forms can help you with that. Are you gathering data for your current research projects as a researcher or student? You can use online forms to do so. Or, are you a teacher, looking for a way to remotely test the knowledge of your students? Again, online forms are the tool for you.

In any case, you can use Microsoft Forms to create the online forms that suits your needs.

Summary

In this course you will learn everything you need to know about Microsoft Forms in order to create great online quizzes, surveys, registration forms and other types of forms. We’ll take a step by step approach, starting from the basics all the way to understanding the responses to our form. We’ll also be working on three practical examples: a customer satisfaction survey, an online quiz and an event registration form. You’ll get access to three downloadable files: a flowchart that help you streamline your workflow, a quality checklist and a measurement item-selection flowchart. So that after this course you will be able to confidently create your own effective online forms to gather the data you need.

What is Microsoft Forms and why would want to learn about it?

Microsoft Forms is a powerful mostly free tool that allows you to create online forms. You can fill these forms with questions and other means to gather data, creating a survey. Then, send out your survey and let it gather data while you focus on other important tasks. You can also turn your form into a quiz that could automatically grade your student’s quizzes. This way you can remotely test the knowledge of your students while saving time. Or, perhaps you are thinking of celebrating a party and want to keep track of your attendants and their dietary wishes. An online form can help you to make sure you are prepared for your event.

Who is this course for?

The course is accessible to anyone, so even if you are a complete beginner you will be able to create your own online form, especially in the shape of an online survey, an online quiz and an event registration form. The course is likely to be most beneficial to anyone in the complete beginner to intermediate range. However, even if you have more experience with this topic you are very welcome to join!

This course is mainly based on the functionalities of the free version of Microsoft Forms. But, even if Office 365 users will be able to learn something new about these free functions. And, we’ll also spend time on a function exclusive to Office 365: adding collaborators to our form.

What will I learn in this course?

This course takes a step by step approach to learning. So, we’ll start out with the very basics. At the end of the course you will be able to create your own complete online form. The course is divided into the following steps, for more information feel free to browse the video curriculum:

1. The basics: We’ll go over the basic functionalities of Microsoft Forms, such as: creating an account, finding your forms and customizing your forms.

2. The question types/measurement items: We’ll learn about the different types of questions and measurement items we can use in our forms. We’ll spend a lecture on each of them, in which we will discuss their characteristics, their advantages and disadvantages and when to use them. Ofcourse, we’ll also learn how to create and use these measurement items.

3. Responses: Now that our form has gathered data for us, we can make use of Microsoft Forms’ responses-section to see what the data is trying to tell us. We’ll go over this responses-section so you’ll be able to interpret your data.

4. Branching logic & Sections: First, we’ll discuss what a branching form logic is. Then, we’ll learn how we can use the section functionality to create such a form logic, so we can make sure that the right people see the right parts of our forms.

5. Sharing your form: After creating our beautiful form, we will want to send it out to our participants. We’ll make sure we know how to do so. We’ll talk about the different methods we can use to share our form and when we want to use each of them.

6. Workflow for creating forms: The process of creating forms involves a decent number of steps. We’ll learn how we can best structure our work process, so we can work as efficiently as possible when creating our own forms.

7. Quizzes: We’ll learn how we can turn our form into a quiz and how we can automatically grade our student’s hand-ins so we can test their knowledge.

8. Adding collaborators (Office 365): Working together often yields better results. So, we’ll also learn how we can add collaborators to our form. Please note: this option is only available for Office 365 users.

Practical examples: Customer satisfaction survey, online quiz and an event registration form

After we have learned about the essential functionalities of Microsoft Forms we’ll be creating a survey, a quiz and an event registration form, so you can follow along and see how we can put our knowledge into practice.

Creating a customer satisfaction survey

If you own/work for a business, customers and their needs are very important. A respected author in the field of marketing once said: ‘If you want to know what your customers want, just ask them.’ (paraphrased). Surveys are a quick, easy and effective way to ask your customers who they are, what they think about your product/service and what other services they need.

We’ll be making our own customer satisfaction survey in this course, so you can follow along and learn how you can gather important customer-related data yourself.

Creating an online quiz

If you are a teacher it is likely that you want to test your student’s knowledge. Online quizzes allow you to do that, and to do it remotely. This way you can assign and assess quizzes from any location. Microsoft Forms also offers the opportunity to grade quizzes automatically (when your quiz does not contain open questions), saving you time.

We’ll be making our own online quiz in this course, so you can follow along and learn how you can assess your student’s knowledge yourself.

An ‘issue’ with Microsoft Forms is that users of free Microsoft Forms can not automatically send students their grades, but during this course we will learn about an easy workaround for this problem. So that even if you use the free version of Microsoft Forms, you will still be able to assess your students’ tests and send them their grades.

Creating an event registration form

The previous two examples show how useful online forms can be in both business and educational environments. But, forms can also be of great use in informal settings. To illustrate this, we will also be creating our own event registration form. So, after following along you will be able to create your own form to gather data about who will be present at your events!

Downloadable files: workflow chart, quality checklist, measurement item-selection flowchart

You’ll get access to three downloadable files. The first is flowchart which will help you to structure your workflow, so you can work as effectively as possible when creating your own form. The second file is a checklist that you can always use to quickly assess your survey and ensure its quality. The third is a flowchart that you can use to quickly find out what measurement item (or, question type) is best suited for your purposes.

I’m looking forward to seeing you in the course!