Why we developed a FormBuilder for schools
Conducting student surveys is an important but tedious part of a teacher’s duties. There are important surveys conducted annually, such as the Subject Combination Allocation Exercise that would influence the students’ academic lives. I remember my teachers having to pass around physical forms for us to fill up. Most likely, they would have to tally up the responses in an Excel sheet. It was inefficient, to say the least.
Initially, ESTL received a request to support schools’ Subject Combination Allocation Exercise and CCA Allocation Exercise. However, it was not feasible to build dedicated systems for exercises that are only conducted once a year.
Instead, we decided to break down the request into 2 parts. The first part would be to build a generic data collection tool. Next, we supplemented it with excel templates for the allocation exercises¹. With this, we are able to incorporate the data collection tool, All Ears, into MOE’s tech stack. This allows schools to reuse All Ears for other purposes.
We considered using FormSG at first. But, there were several requirements MOE needed that FormSG could not meet. Mainly, the form builder needed to integrate the schools’ roster data. i.e. The form builder should contain information about schools, staff, and students. There are two reasons why we needed this data.
Firstly, the form builder needs to allow users to select specific groups of audiences
In schools, teachers may create surveys for specific groups of students to respond to. For example, only Secondary 2 students should respond to the Subject Allocation Exercise. Teachers can specify this rule with the roster data integrated into the form builder.
The image below shows an example of the teacher selecting the “Student” audience type. Only Secondary 2 students can respond to this particular form.
If a student who isn’t in Secondary 2 tries to access the form…
The form creator also has the option to set the form to “Public”, allowing anyone with the link to respond to the form.
Secondly, the form builder needs to allow users to efficiently track submissions
Imagine having to keep track of students who have not submitted the form. It might still be manageable for a class of 40, but it can get tiresome if you have several classes to track.
All Ears segregates the respondents into their respective groups. Selecting a “Student” audience type will group students into their respective classes. Teachers will know at a glance who has/has not submitted the form.
To date, over 10,000 forms have been created using All Ears. That being said, the form is still in its pilot stage, and there are some notable features that are in the pipeline. They are:
1. Allowing form creators to create their own groups
Currently, only default groups such as classes or levels are supported. Eventually, we want to allow form creators to create groups for themselves. An example use case for this is if a teacher wants to send a form only to the CCA leaders. He/she will not be able to do this based on the current form builder.
2. Allowing collaborative editing
Right now, form creators can view forms shared with them by other users. But for large-scale surveys, teachers may prefer to collaborate on the same form.
We contemplated if we should fork and branch off from FormSG, but we decided against it. It is likely that FormSG’s future direction is different from MOE’s. Data collection is an essential tool needed by any organisation. And we felt that it would be easier to build our own solution, rather than find ways to align FormSG to our needs.
If the project interests you, do send in your resume to hello@estl.sg!
¹ A separate subject combination allocation template was incorporated into the form builder. The template comes with a base allocation formula and statistics as a starting point for schools, which can be further customised depending on their needs. Since schools are already familiar with Excel, we felt that this was the best trade-off between feasibility and building a generic solution that schools can reuse.
