Introduction
Microsoft Forms is a tool that is available for educators. This blog post by Microsoft asserts that this tool is for quizzing and assessment that can provide feedback instantly. This is a relatively new tool that could have many uses for student affairs professionals.
Pricing
Microsoft Forms is available with an Office 365 Education Subscription. Many institutions are in the process of moving or have moved to Office 365 for students, faculty, and staff therefore it is quite possible that you have this option for free already. Please log in to your organization’s Office 365 web app to determine if you have this tool.
Overall Thoughts
This product is very new and is only available to Office 365 Education which is pretty apparent through its ability to create multiple choice quizzes fairly quickly, including options to inform quiz takers why an answer is right or wrong after submission. One can also assign point values to questions in order to simplify grading. Microsoft Forms is very educator focused, but this does not mean that it cannot be used by educational administrators too. In fact, I think Microsoft Forms can be effective in organizational training.
If I am responsible for student organization leader training and I could create a quiz that students must receive a certain number of points/percentage on to pass. After creating this quiz, I could create a training session or training video with all of this information that I want the student leaders to know. The Microsoft Forms quiz would be able to 1) track who completed the training, 2) track what information was not learned by the group and/or individuals for later improvement, 3) provide easy ability to follow up with individuals who did not pass for additional training.
Some of the limitations are not having an email notification function, allowing insertion of pictures/videos, and document uploads. However, Microsoft products do update regularly and I can see some of these features being added in the future to make the product more marketable to Business and Enterprise suites.
Examples
Are you a visual learner? Look at this form here or view an embedded version below to lay eyes on what the form actually looks like.
Shane Young, M.Ed 