Support / Teacher Guide / Creating course questionnaires

Creating course questionnaires

Most teachers have no practical way to find out whether a course changed anything. Questionnaires let you ask at the beginning, in the middle and at the end. Answers are stored without participants’ names, so you can read what people wrote and see how the group moved without knowing who said what.

What They Are

Two ways to get a questionnaire

A questionnaire is a set of questions your participants answer inside the app. You can either write your own, or import a standard wellbeing instrument from the built-in library. Both live at the organisation level, so once you have one you can put it on any of your courses.

  • Import a standard instrument: a small library of established wellbeing measures, each with its scoring already built in. Use these when you want a recognised measure and a score you can compare across courses.
  • Write your own: your questions, your wording. Your own questionnaires collect answers but do not calculate a score yet. If you need scoring, import a library instrument.

Not for screening. Clinical or diagnostic screening questionnaires are not permitted on the platform. Questionnaires here are for understanding how a course is landing, not for assessing anyone’s health.

One-Off Setup

Before questionnaires go live

Questionnaire answers are health-related data, and your organisation, not BeWell IT, is the data controller for them. Because of that, an organisation admin has to acknowledge a short data-processing summary once before any questionnaire becomes visible to participants.

Open the Teacher tab and choose Questionnaires. If the acknowledgment is outstanding you will see a banner saying questionnaires stay hidden from participants until an organisation admin acknowledges the data-processing summary. Choose Review and acknowledge, read it, and confirm.

Until that is done you can still create and import questionnaires. They simply stay dormant, and participants see nothing. This applies to questionnaires we set up for you as well, so seeding content does not skip the step.

Exports are yours to look after. Anything you download as a CSV leaves the platform, so it sits outside our deletion guarantees and becomes your organisation’s responsibility.

Authoring

Writing your own questionnaire

On the Teacher tab, choose Questionnaires, then New questionnaire. Give it a Title, an optional Description, and an estimate of how many minutes it takes. Participants see that estimate before they start, so keep it honest.

Use Add item to build the questionnaire. Five item types are available:

  • Rating scale: one set of scale points, such as 0 to 5, answered against several statements. This is how most standard instruments are built.
  • Single choice: one question, one answer from a list of choices.
  • Free text: an open box for anything a participant wants to write.
  • Number: a single numeric answer.
  • Info text: a screen of explanation with nothing to answer. Useful for section introductions.

Any item can be marked Optional, which lets participants skip it. A rating scale needs at least two scale points with values that increase from first to last, and at least one statement. A single-choice item needs at least two choices. Do not number your own items, because numbering is added for you.

Preview as participant shows exactly what people will see, one question per screen, without saving anything. You can also Duplicate a questionnaire to make a variant, or Archive one you no longer use.

Editing stops once answers arrive. As soon as a questionnaire has responses it is marked Locked and can no longer be edited, so that everyone who answered answered the same thing. To make changes, use Duplicate to edit and put the new version on your next course.

The Library

Importing a standard instrument

From the Questionnaires screen, open the Instrument library. Each entry shows roughly how long it takes and which scores it produces. Choose Import on the one you want.

Before the import completes you are shown the instrument’s licence terms and asked to confirm that your organisation will use it in accordance with them. This is a real undertaking, not a formality, so read the terms. Some instruments are free for any use, others are restricted to non-commercial use, and the responsibility for meeting those terms sits with your organisation. Choose Confirm and import to continue.

Imported instruments appear alongside your own with an Imported badge and a Licence confirmed badge. They keep the wording and the scoring published by their authors, so you cannot edit the questions. If we publish a newer version you will see Update available.

Scheduling

Putting a questionnaire on a course

A questionnaire reaches participants as an activity, in the same way a meditation or a reminder does. Add a questionnaire activity to your template or course, then choose which questionnaire it uses and when it should run.

  • Phase: Beginning of course, Mid-course, End of course, or Custom. The phase is what pairs a before-and-after measure, so use Beginning of course and End of course for the same instrument if you want to see change.
  • Response window (days): how long participants have to answer. Leave it empty to use the default.

Participants are prompted when they open the app, but they are never blocked from using it. For an end-of-course questionnaire the app also sends up to three notifications, spread across the response window, and stops as soon as someone completes it or says they are not taking part. Those notifications never name the questionnaire or the activity, so nothing appears on a lock screen that would suggest what is being measured.

Results

Reading the results

On the Teacher tab, open Questionnaire results for the course. There are three tabs.

  • Completion: your participants by name, and where each of them has got to. A participant is Not started, Submitted, Submitted late, or Not taking part. This is the only place names appear, and it deliberately shows status only, never answers.
  • Responses: the individual answers, including anything typed into a free-text box, with no names attached. You can read what someone wrote, but the app does not tell you who wrote it.
  • Summary: the group view, with the number of responses shown as n. Where an instrument ran at both the beginning and the end, you also get a Before & after comparison showing how the group moved.

Export responses (CSV) downloads the answers for your own analysis. The file carries no names, no account identifiers and no exact submission times.

Small groups need care. Answers are stored without names, but that is not the same as being anonymous. In a small cohort, something written in a free-text answer, or the simple fact that only one person answered in a given week, can still make someone recognisable. Treat results from small groups accordingly, and be careful about sharing them.

Participants

What your participants see

The first time a questionnaire appears on a course, participants are shown a consent screen naming your organisation as the data controller, explaining what is collected and how it is stored. They confirm that they are 18 or older and agree to take part. Questionnaires are for adults only, and they are not available on guest accounts.

Taking part is genuinely optional. Someone can choose I’m not taking part and still use everything else in the course, and they can change their mind later. Once they have started, they answer one question per screen, their progress is saved as they go, and they can finish on a different device.

A participant can also stop at any time and choose whether to keep or delete the answers they have already given. If they delete their account, their questionnaire answers go with it, including answers they previously chose to keep.

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Last updated: 2 September 2026