D2L Brightspace Tips: Better Survey Reports

Survey reports in D2L can be difficult to comprehend and the data is not presented in a very user-friendly format.

Pivot Data in Survey Reports Using Excel or Python

The steps in the video will reformat the Individual Attempts survey report so that each Likert question statement is in a column instead of a row by creating a PivotTable in Excel. Use a combination of filtering, flash fill, and formulas/functions to clean the data before creating a PivotTable. In cell A2, enter =B2 and in cell A3, enter =IF(B3="",A2,B3). If there are multiple attempts on the survey, the responses are averaged. A Python script to automatically pivot the survey data is also available.

Direct link to video, with transcript widget

If your survey includes different question types with responses that use both text and numbers, you will need to do some extra steps in order for the PivotTable to work correctly. You must create a table from your data and add it to the Data Model, then add a Measure in the PivotTable. This is only possible with the Windows version of Excel using an Excel (not CSV) file. Check out Mastery View Data Pivot for the steps.

Get Attempt Number for Multiple Attempts on a Survey

If there are multiple attempts on a survey in D2L, the Individual Attempts report in D2L does not indicate which response belongs to which attempt. This means that the data is not usable if the same survey for both pre-tests and post-tests is given to students. For Likert questions on a 1-5 scale, for example, responses are always presented in numerical order rather than in the order of the attempts. Fortunately, the Brightspace data set of Survey Attempts includes the Attempt Number. Follow the Survey Responses ETL data flow to download the necessary data.