5.7.2 Adding media in form responses

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Why add media to your form ?
• How to add media to your form ?

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Why add media to your form ?

In addition to text questions or responses, it is possible to add pictures and audio recordings inside the form. The idea is to bring more clarity for both the enumerators and respondants in certain contexts or regarding specific aspects of a topic.

Here are a few examples where the use of media can be pertinent:

• Pictures of different water treatment solutions (water and sanitation surveys)

  

• Smileys symbols (e.g. when interviewing children)

  

• Adding an audio recording in a question or a note (e.g. reminder of key expressions such as the definition of a household, the list of symptoms of a disease, etc.). The audio can be run by the interviewer only if needed as a reminder and would use much less space than a long text definition.

  

How to add media to your form ?

Adding medias to your form requires handling XLSForm format. If you started to create your form with the online form builder, you want to export it to be able to modify the form and add media files: Click on your form > click on the “More Actions” button (symbol “…”) > Download XLS

Once you have the XLSForm file, open it and create the questions where you want to add medias to.

• To add pictures related to the label of a question > add a new column labelled “media::image” in the “survey” sheet

  

• To add pictures for the responses of a question (e.g. when there is a list of responses to pick from) > add a new column labelled “media::image” in the “choices” sheet

  

• To add an audio recording, the procedure is similar > add a new column labelled “media::audio” in the appropriate sheet (“survey” and/or “choices”)
• Once the column(s) is(are) added, you need to fill up the cells with the name of the corresponding media file (not the path where the file is, only its name, such as “aquatab.jpg”).

• Once finished and saved, upload the XLS file into KoBoToolbox (through the homepage upload or by updating your previous project):

  

• Make sure that you Deploy it.

  

• Go to the Deployed section, select the form and click on “Settings” to display the advanced menu.

  

• Upload the corresponding files as shown below (Settings > Media > Add document > Choose files). Make sure to click on “Upload” to import the files. You can import more than one file at a time.

  

• Once your files have been uploaded, check that they are all listed:

  

• Click on Save Changes and in the “Form” tab, click on Redeploy so that the survey is updated, and media files are considered in the process next time you run the survey.

  

  

• Before downloading and testing the finalized form in your external device, you can perform a first check online to ensure that the media files are properly inserted: go to the FORM tab > Under “Collect data, click OPEN

  

  If the media is not displayed (and you see the icon below), you should:

  

  • make sure that the expected media is in the list of uploaded media
  • make sure that the spelling and letter case in the XLSForm is exactly the same as the filename (including the file extension).