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Extension of Poll

1 Requirements

The object type Poll has been introduced with ILIAS 4.3 to realise simple polls with single choice. A poll is always presented as an object in the right column of container objects.
 
On this page we are collecting necessary extensions of the poll feature that should be realised in an upcoming version of ILIAS.

A. Multiple Choice:
To use the poll for finding the best date of an upcoming group event it is necessary not only to make one choice but multiple (i.e. three days out of five offered). The admin must have the possibility to limit the choices: 0=unlimited, 1,2,3,...
 
B. Allow own answers
Sometimes it`s necessary that users can add their own answers. The option "Allow users to enter their own answers" is helpful for that case.
 
C. Show results by votes
Actually, the results are shown by position. An additional option: "Show results" by with the the two choices "Position" and "Votes" is an additional helpful feature.
 
D. Allow comments
Allow comments, presentation of comments: Click a link "Comments", and the comments will be shown in a overlay. (Let us keep the polling tool small. So comments ist just another - helpful - feature, but maybe not necessary.
 
E. Participants Overview:
Sometimes it might be interesting to have an overview on the participants of a poll and their votes. The first implementation of the poll object in version 4.3 every poll offeres only anonymised polls. But a participants overview might be helpful in small teams where you want to see who still needs to vote to get the full view of the group' opinion. This option implies a setting "Anonymised poll" to distinguish between polls with and without participants overview.
 
F. Export results
Allow admins to export the results
 
G. Pie charts
Allow users to switch between bar chart (implemented) and pie chart.
 
H. Notification:
Sometimes it might be important to get notifications about given votes. We need to clarify if we want "Notification after each vote" (which could result in a lot of notification traffic in polls for bigger groups or courses) or "Daily notification by cronjob" or both.

JL 05 Aug 2014: The following suggestion has been added after the JF decision (alonso, October 2013) and thus is not scheduled for 4.5.

I. Anonymous participants
Sometimes it's necessary that anonymous users can participate in a poll, this possibility exists in surveys and it would be useful in polls. Could be used a captcha system to prevent fraud, as it happens with messages from anonymous users in forums.

2 Status

• Scheduled for: Release 5.0
• Funding: Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
• Maintainer: Jörg Lützenkirchen, Leifos GmbH
• Development: Feature is to be developed by Leifos

3 Additional Information

• If you want to know more about this feature, its implementation or funding, please contact: Matthias Kunkel

4 Discussion

JF 13 Sep 2013: We support most if the ideas:

• Multiple Choice: +
• Allow own answers: - (we are unsure, how the behaviour should exactly be, we expect this to confuse the users)
• Show results by votes: +
• Allow comments: +
• Participants Overview: +
• Export results: +
• Pie charts: +
• Notification: +

We schedule the the "+" items for 4.5. We have to specify the details of the "particiation overview" feature. It could be an option that only tutors (write permission) see who has voted for what, or that even learners can see this information. Most importantly the learner must be aware of whether the current poll is (pseudo-)anonym or not - so an appropriate message must be displayed somewhere.

JF 17 Feb 2014: We would like to avoid an extra cron job for the poll notifications. So daily digests could be an option if the general notification service has been revised. For now direct mails would be ok. Users can subsribe to the notifications as it is possible for wikis.

5 Implementation

JL 24 Feb 2014: Points A, C, E, F, H  have been implemented in trunk/4.5. Comments (D) and Pie charts (G) should be implemented by end of April.
B has been declined (see JF above) and I was not part of the JF decision.

FW 28. April 2014: Points D and G, have also been implemented in trunk/4.5.