Presenters can conduct Multiple Choice polls with optional written questions and customizable answer templates at any time. In addition, polls with individual user responses are also possible. Results can subsequently be published anonymously for users in the public chat and on the presentation in the conference room.
Click on the Actions button (plus icon at the bottom left in the main area) and select "Start a poll".
The poll section will appear in the left column and the corresponding menu will open.
In the upper part of the menu (1) you can optionally formulate a question that will be displayed to the users instead of the "Polling options" title. Using the "Response Types" in the area below, you can determine the type of poll.
For polls with predefined response choices, you can choose from three templates (2):
If none of the three templates meets your requirements, it doesn't matter which one you choose. In the next step you can individualize the responses.
If you have selected a template, the response choices now appear below in the form of text fields. Click in a text field (4) to edit the answer. You can delete elements using the trash can button (5) to the right of the field and you can also "Add item" (6) using the button of the same name. You can specify a maximum of 20 response choices. Empty text fields are not adopted as responses.
If you want to prepare polls in advance, you can already save the response choices in a file. To do this, write each response on a separate line and save the file as text (extension: .txt).
Below the response choices and the "Start Poll" button you will find the text field (7) for uploading the text file. Open your file explorer, select the file, drag and drop it into the text field and let go. The responses are automatically taken over and appear both as elements and in the upload text field. If you edit them there, you can apply the changes made by clicking the "Fill poll values" button (8).
With the template "User Response" (3) you enable the respondents to give their own answer. A question (1) must be specified here. In the poll results, equal answers are grouped.
BigBlueButton detects questions on slides of the presentation and offers presenters a quick option to start the poll. Thus, polls can be created in advance and can be built into the content of the presentation.
It is recommended using the following reply options:
Ensure you are using the format: question followed by reply options. The latter must be terminated with a closing parenthesis. If several questions are to appear on one page, it is advisable to create each survey in its own PowerPoint text field in order to achieve better acceptance. For example:
Question (True/False)?
Question (Yes/No)?
Question (Yes/No/Abstention)?
Question?
a) Response 1
b) Response 2
c) Response 3
Upon successful detection of the intended poll, BigBlueButton will display the Quick Poll button with the detected format on the left side of the presentation control. If there are multiple questions on the current slide, a selection will be displayed. This button starts the poll directly and the poll menu opens with information about the votes cast.
Once you have finished creating the poll, you can "Start Poll" by clicking on the button of the same name.
For users a window for submitting an answer will then appear at the bottom right of the main area. The title "Polling options" is displayed here if no question has been set. Users can select one of the responses by clicking on it or, in the case of individual response choices, click in the text field displayed, enter an response and vote by pressing Enter or clicking on the Submit button.
As users respond to the poll, the results are visible to presenters in the poll menu:
In the upper area (11) anonymized with the number of votes and the percentage and in the lower area (13) assignable to individual users.
The number of votes cast can be seen in the status (12) "Waiting for responses". If all users have cast their votes, this changes to "Done".
You can publish the anonymized "Publish polling results" via the button of the same name. At the same time, this will end the poll, no more votes can be cast.
The results with the percentage distribution appear as an annotation in the lower right corner on the currently visible slide, so that you can remove them again with all other annotations via the delete tool (trash icon). Backing up these results is only possible via screenshot.
In addition, the results are displayed in the public chat, which is why they can also be saved via the copy and save function.
After publishing the results, start a new poll via the "Start Poll" button.
You can collapse the poll menu via the arrow at the top left of this area (9); it will then appear as a menu below the shared notes and above the users list. You can select this to reopen the poll menu. If the poll is running, the intermediate status of the votes cast is displayed.
Use the X symbol at the top right (10) to close the poll menu so that the current poll is ended and the menu item also disappears from the first column.