Questions and answers

This was covered in the tutorial - see Delivering a survey. Note that when an administrator delivers a survey to one or more Manhattan classrooms, the survey appears on the "My Manhattan" login page for the users being surveyed. (In contrast, when a teacher delivers a survey within a classroom's Surveys module, it appears as a message within that module.)

You can move any survey from your "Private" list into the "Public" list by first clicking on the "Public" link:

Then select "Make survey public" from the form that appears and click Submit:

Any survey that has been made Public can be used by any teacher in any of their classrooms. They'll see the survey listed under the "Public" heading after clicking the New Item button within the Surveys module. Teachers can choose to deliver the survey as-is, or can copy the survey to their Private list for modification. See Manhattan 2.2 Teacher's Reference for the full story on the teacher's perspective.

You can make any survey on your "Private" list "WWW Accessible". First, click on the "Public" link:

Then select "Make survey WWW accessible" from the form that appears, and click Submit:

The survey will be moved into the "WWW accessible" area of your survey listing, and you will get a page like this, which lists the URLS associated with the survey.

There are three sets of URLs. The first contains the URL for the survey itself. Email it to those you'd like to take the survey, or post it on a web page. (It's possible to create a web page at a "nicer" URL, e.g. "http://manhattan.wnec.edu/computer_survey.html" that automatically redirects the user's browser to the cryptic URL provided by Manhattan.)

The second section of the above screenshot lists two URLs that lead directly to the bar graph results, and the raw data expressed as an HTML table, respectively. You can give these out to anyone who you would like to see the results of the survey as they come in.

The third section of the above screenshot lists two "password protected" (well, sort of) URLs that lead to the results. When the URLs are visited, the user will be prompted to enter the access code (508467 in the above screenshot) before they are shown the results.

You can see these URLs again by clicking on the "Access Codes" link associated with the survey as shown in the screenshot below. Also, note the "Graphs" and "Data" links in the screenshot. As a Manhattan administrator, you can get to the results of the survey via those command links - you do not have to visit the URLS discussed above, those are for people besides you.

You should note that because "WWW accessible" surveys are presented outside of the Manhattan environment, there is no authentication done, and thus there's no way to prevent the same person from taking the survey several times.

Whenever you click on a Copy link associated with any survey, a copy of that survey is immediately added to your "Private" list, where it can be modified, or delivered again:

Design the survey - it will appear in your "Private" list. Click Finalize when the survey is the way you want it, then click Public:

Next, select the "Give survey to teacher w/username" radio button, enter the username of the teacher in the text box, and click the Submit button:

The survey will be copied from your Private list into the Private list of the selected teacher. That teacher will see the survey in the Surveys module of all of their courses. They can deliver it as-is, make copies of it, and modify it further. You can enter the Private list of the teacher to convince yourself that it has been copied successfully - see the next question.

Click on the Enter Teacher's Surveys button at the top of your list of surveys:

This leads to a page listing all of the users on the system who have created Private surveys. Click on a name to enter their survey list:

After selecting a teacher, you will be looking at the same list of surveys that teacher sees from within the Surveys module of any of their classrooms:

You'll find that the ability to move surveys between any teacher's private list and your private list opens up a lot of possiblities. Although there are sometimes several steps involved you can:

• Design a survey and give it to one or more teachers.

• Take a survey designed by a teacher and make it Public so it can be used by any teacher.

• Take a survey designed by a teacher and copy it to one or more other teacher's private lists.

• Take a survey designed by a teacher and deliver it on the web outside the Manhattan environment.

• And so on...

You can't. Or rather, you shouldn't. Surveys issued by a teacher within the Surveys module of a classroom are intended to be private. Of course, you can always ask the teacher for his password and login to get the results. Another approach is to temporarily add yourself as a second teacher to the classroom (hopefully with that teacher's permission), get the survey results, and remove yourself as a teacher - see Add a teacher

Mostly, no. Since a standalone classroom (see Normal, Template and Standalone Courses) allows the teacher to invent users, it would be possible for a person to create a teacher that has the same username as an existing teacher using the "normal", central login system. That ficticious teacher would have full access to the real teacher's surveys if they were linked together, so they are not.

A teacher of a standalone course can not create their own surveys, and therefore you, as system administrator cannot give them Private surveys or enter their private list of surveys. They don't have a private list of surveys! However teachers of standalone courses DO have access to any surveys you have made Public. Thus the only thing a standalone teacher can do is issue a Public survey to their students, without modification.

Surveys are stored as XML files within subdirectories of the surveys directory of your Manhattan installation. You'll find a surveys/(username) directory for each teacher who has created a Private survey. The surveys/_admin_ directory holds the system administrator's surveys (and their results if delivered.) The surveys/_www_ directory holds any surveys (and their results) that were made "WWW accessible" by the administrator.

Note that the results for surveys delivered by a Manhattan administrator are stored within the main surveys directory of your installation as described above. However, when a teacher delivers a survey using the Surveys module within a classroom, a copy of the survey (and the results) is written to that course's directory on the server. Look in, for example, ../courses/try/phy10101/people/ae4322/surveys for any surveys delivered by our Prof. Einstein within his Physics course used in the tutorial.

You should not mess with these files outside of the web-based administration tools!

With any system like Manhattan's surveys there's always room for improvement. The "known issues" that you should be aware of involve copying a survey to a Manhattan user that is not a teacher, and removing Private surveys that belonged to users who no longer have a Manhattan account.

When you "Give survey to teacher w/username:", Manhattan doesn't check to see if the username you entered actually belongs to a teacher. That's because Manhattan doesn't make a firm distinction between whether a user is a student or a teacher. A person can be a student in some classes and a teacher in others. If a user doesn't happen to have any classes that he teaches at the moment, well he's not a teacher. The bottom line is that you might accidentally copy the survey to the Private list of a student (a person who is not teaching any Manhattan classes at the moment.) There's really no harm done, since that student can't possibly see or issue any surveys until he becomes a teacher. You can "Enter Teacher's Surveys" to delete the survey(s) you have copied if you realize your mistake.

You should also know that a user's list of private surveys is NOT deleted when that user account is completely removed from Manhattan. If you again add a user with the same username, he'll get all of his surveys back. For this version of Manhattan at least, if you want to delete all of the private surveys created by a user that has been completely removed from the system, you'll have to use the "Enter Teacher's Surveys" feature and manually delete them one-by-one