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Inside Higher Ed reports today on Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments (Jossey-Bass, 2009), a new book by Derek Bruff, Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt. Actually, IHE interviews Bruff about the book’s topic—classroom response systems or “clickers”—instead of presenting a book review.
The interview raised some important questions for teachers and institutions using clickers, such as the matter of standardization. Teaching with Classroom Response Systems just released on February 17, so I haven’t seen the book or had time to read it. Therefore, I won’t pretend to comment on the book itself. Two items within the interview, however, caught my eye and call for a quick response.
When asked about brand standardization, Bruff replied (in part),
Most faculty and staff members with whom I talk about clickers are concerned with the cost to students of the devices. This has led many campuses to adopt particular brands of clickers so that students need not purchase two or three clickers for different courses. Not only does this save students money, but it makes it easier for staff to provide technical and pedagogical support for faculty members using clickers.
I agree with this important concern, but read on. When asked what features he’d like to see added to existing clicker systems, Bruff answered,
Clickers do a great job of collecting and aggregating student responses to multiple-choice questions. Existing technology does not, however, work quite as well with free-response questions. I am hoping to see the development of input devices that allow students to quickly and easily respond with words, phrases, or sentences.
Devices that allow students to quickly and easily respond with words, phrases, or sentences already exist, and most students have already incurred the cost of purchasing these devices before they ever show up for the first day of their first college course:
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Having used classroom response systems (clickers) for the past couple of years, I recently abandoned them in favor of a polling and free-response system that students can access online or using SMS. Our institutional research people here at Pepperdine tell me that 95% of our incoming students bring laptops with them to college, and virtually all bring cell phones with text-messaging (SMS) plans. Using these existing tools addresses both of the issues above: students (or more likely their parents) have already purchased these tools, thus addressing the cost issue, and free-response questions are easy to capture, thus addressing the usage issue. Such schemes must always contend with poor cell reception, of course, though an institution that wanted to standardize could always roll an iPhone into the standard entry package, as Abilene Christian University has done (and others have since followed suit). Using laptops assumes that the college or university maintains a reliable wireless network, too, but that assumption should hold good at reputable schools these days. (I mean “should” as a moral claim, not an ontological claim, for those of you keeping score at home.)
Bruff knows about these solutions, of course:
I have spoken with several instructors who have started to use systems that allow students to submit responses via various mobile devices — cell phones, smart phones, and laptops — that make it easier for students to do so. These developments are exciting, but there is a need for tools that will help instructors quickly make sense of responses to open-ended questions. Development of such tools would open up a lot of possibilities for these systems.
No “tool” can substitute for actually reading free-text responses, of course, but some strategies already exist for quick processing, and others are surely coming. Consider, for example, the popular “word cloud.” For this example, I asked my students to supply one word that could complete the sentence, “The Bible is …” They texted their responses to a short code issued by my polling service provider, PollEverywhere. Using PollEverywhere’s tools, I immediately generated a .csv file with a list of student responses. I copied the responses out of the .csv file and pasted them into Wordle, and got the following result (the size of the word indicates the frequency of response):
Naturally, I would prefer a tool where I didn’t have to export, copy, and paste the data, but I imagine that such tools will become widely available before long. And I imagine that Bruff’s book, at 240 pages, includes discussion of “best practices” for clicker use that would apply to any sort of live polling, whether using clickers or text messaging. Maybe I’m jumping the gun here, but it seems to me that narrow-band, highly specialized gadgets like clickers are the trailing end of the instructional technology wave, and the future of IT lies in finding new ways to turn students’ existing gadgets from liabilities (distractions) into assets.
6 comments Christopher Heard | computers and software, science and technology, teaching and learning
I came to the same conclusion, Chris, after researching clicker technology for a possible grant. Since the installation of the new AT&T tower on Pepperdine’s campus (reception being an issue before that) and the fact that classes of 30 or less can use PollEverywhere for FREE there is no reason to use clickers for small classroom settings. Other than this, clicker checkout and check-in processes are never as easy as saying “take out your cell phones.” I love the Wordle integration; maybe a script could be written to automate this process.
Thanks for commenting on my interview. I agree with your points about leveraging existing mobile devices as part of classroom response systems. I, too, suspect that dedicated “clicker” devices may be on the way out. Some instructors don’t like their students to use cell phones and laptops during class since they provide students with easy distractions, of course. But I hear more and more from instructors who are interested in letting students tap into the Internet to bring outside resources inside the classroom. I’m participating in the “iPhone conference” at Abilene Christian University this weekend, and I hope that we’ll have some great discussions exploring these issues.
Another point that I think is important to make is that many faculty members are hesitant to adopt new technology in the classroom unless the technology is very reliable and very easy to use. Your example of using Wordle to generate a word cloud is a great one, but until tools exist to automate such things, many faculty members won’t be interested in pursuing that kind of classroom interaction. (I’m glad to say that ACU has developed a word cloud tool for iPhones!) One advantage that clickers currently have is that many vendors have very reliable and very easy to use systems that can be used “off the shelf.” That has led to greater faculty use of classroom response systems. I think that’s a good thing, since CRSs can facilitate and enhance so many different types of pedagogies.
One more comment: In writing my book, I anticipated that the technology of classroom response systems would change over time, but I wanted my book to remain useful. Thus, in talking about various applications of CRSs in the classroom, I only assumed very basic functionality–the ability to rapidly collect student responses to multiple-choice (and perhaps free-response) questions and generate a bar chart showing those responses. So I hope the book is useful to instructors no matter what kind of technology they use.
[...] Heard, associate professor of religion at Pepperdine University, commented on my recent Inside Higher Ed interview, describing some of the advantages of leveraging existing [...]
Thank you for the comment, Derek (if I may be familiar)! I wish I could join you at the ACU conference. Unfortunately, Pepperdine’s travel budget has felt the pinch of the current economy. The ACU iPhone video actually inspired my use of Wordle; I have not found any commercially (or better yet, freely) available back-end application that automates the process like theirs does. For what it’s worth, I’m an ACU graduate, and several of my friends appear in ACU’s iPhone initiative videos. At any rate, I look forward to learning from your book whatever I can use to improve my use of SMS and web-based polling and classroom interaction.
I’m sorry you won’t be able to attend the ACU event this weekend, Chris. I’m sure many of us in attendance will be blogging about it.
Also, in all my conversations with faculty members about teaching with classroom response systems, I can’t recall meeting anyone in the field of religion who uses them. They are not widely used in any humanities field, of course, but their use in religion seems particularly rare. It’s nice to make the acquaintance of someone who uses them in religion. I would be interested in hearing more about how you use your system at some point.
Hey Chris.
My school, Saint Paul University (Ottawa), has only just recently introduced wireless into a student common area. I’ve been pushing them for about 8 years now (at least). When I started as a student about 10 years ago I was one of the few with a laptop. Now they are everywhere. I was surprised to learn that one of the resistances for WiFi in the classrooms is the fear that students will be Googling the topics as the prof is teaching. It hadn’t occured to me that this would be intimidating, but I can see that it could.
For me I wonder if that isn’t the inevitable push into adjusting our teaching techniques. Years back I worked on developing some interactive curriculum for the high schools. The biggest resistors were young teachers who didn’t want to give up their spot as the talking head at the front of the class. The tool was wonderful as it allowed the teacher to monitor progress and intervene in a personal way to meet a childs specific needs regarding the learning process. Unfortunately, I think it was a product before its time.
I’m not sure that the talking head will ever not fit the University setting – but I’ve certainly benefited from more creative approaches to the learning environment. I would be more inclined to a blended reality myself – and when I lecture I tend to go for interaction more than just me talking. I’d love to see how clickers, or even just SMS messaging, could work. Because the reality I see is that only a percentage of the students ever really voice anything in the class. But the quiet ones are actually often quite articulate and inquisitive one-on-one. SMS might give them an option.