Release 101: Get the lowdown on Surveys within aNewSpring

4 Aug, 2023| Reinier Batterink| 8 min read

Get the lowdown on our new flagship feature: Surveys, which helps us land as your Training Improvement Engine.

You’ll also notice that hand-in assignments are available to a pool of instructors for grading and find a few other cool updates.


All these changes will be available from the 8th of August 2023.

The Survey Feature

Continuous iterative improvement in small incremental steps sounds great on paper, but when it comes to actually implementing them into a learning journey, you of course have to know what and where to improve.

The challenge

As the management guru Peter Drucker famously said, “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.” — so the first step before improving learning journeys is to find out what it lacks.

Gathering feedback from learners while possible with the evaluation questions, doesn’t fill the gap since they do not place the feedback in an overview or within context to derive meaningful insights out of it.

The goal

With the survey feature, you can set up well-defined surveys that can be repeated in multiple templates and learning journeys and used to gauge feedback from your learners.

If you want to know how well your training is performing, or what your learners actually think of your brand and offerings, or even why you hear positive feedback about instructor A and not instructor B, you can do so and validate your assumptions.

Working with Surveys

Surveys are one step ahead of the evaluation activity that we have within the platform. How?

  • You can build a survey with the right goal in mind. A dedicated professional (apart from the training designer or instructor) with the right expertise can focus on creating a well thought-out set of questions.

  • The survey is not bound to a specific template or learning journey. So, gather feedback from a wider aperture and easily visualise where things are working well and where improvements can be made.

  • All results are collected in one overview.

Create and manage surveys

With the Surveys feature, you can create surveys based on your role and rights and manage the content easily—create a new content library or rely on an existing one. Since surveys use the same evaluation questions and content parts from the content libraries, you can efficiently re-use your content!

Additional permission for administrators

In order to keep things clear and allow for division of labour, you’ll find two new permissions within the administrator role. The main one allows users to see results from surveys and the secondary permission lets certain users create and manage the surveys.

The new survey activity

With this release, you’ll find a new survey activity type for the templates (and learning journeys). Learning designers can select the pre-defined survey (created by the survey expert) and add it to an activity at the template level.

In order to keep things clear and fit the purpose of the activity type better, we’ve renamed the ‘Inquiry’ activity type to ‘Questionnaire’.

Viewing the results

Of course there’s a place where you can easily process the feedback!

You’ll find one overview with all the results, per survey, featuring the multiple choice, multiple response, as well as matrix and essay questions.

Templates to get you started

Trouble formulating the right questions of your survey? We got your back—you’ll find a new template with predefined questions to immediately use within a survey.

Hand-in assignments visible to all instructors

When the learner hands in an assignment for assessment, usually they would have to pick an instructor of their choice.

We’ve changed that around so that the hand-in and video hand-in assignments behave like all the other activities—available for all instructors to assess (the first available instructor is able to pick up the assessment for grading).

Reach the course dashboard from learners’ results page

Ever notice that your instructors hit a dead end when they land on the learner results page and have nowhere to navigate from there? Ideally they should be led to the course dashboard from the results page and begin shadowing and offer feedback to learners' questions—and now this is possible!

Small yet powerful

As always, we do have a few smaller updates that pack a punch nonetheless.

Toggle template notifications

It is now easier and faster to work with notifications with the ON/OFF toggle on the notification overview page.

Filter results by ‘active learners’

Wouldn’t it be very convenient to run a report on the number of learners per course and their subscription status? By focusing only on active learners for a course, it becomes very easy to visualise the ROI of your offerings. We’ve added the value ‘state of subscription’ to the reporting engine to help you get this information.

Upload .SVG images in courses, activities and products

Upload your icons and logos as .SVG files for courses, products and activities; ensuring the highest resolution!

No autoplay for videos

In order to ensure the best experience for learners within the aNewSpring environment, we will remove the autoplay feature in the content types like, video, hihaho, vimeo and so on.

Send learners directly to the access codes page

While the access code page has its own link, it leads the learner to the general login page. With this update, we make it easy for you to link your learners directly to the access code page so they can start learning even faster.

Maths, no problem

Add mathematical formulae in your content with the MathJax plugin in the CKEditor. You learners can also respond with mathematical equations without the need for any special coding.

Do you want to read everything we have added? Take a look at the Release Notes:

Some of these features are available for aNewSpring for Trainers and all of them for aNewSpring for Organisations.

If you have any questions regarding the release, do not hesitate to contact our Support Heroes!

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Reinier Batterink

Loves learning from others and letting others learn about a wide variety of topics.

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