Delivering Interactive Lectures through Poll Everywhere
Guest blog by Matt Dyki
With semester about to get underway, revisiting and updating my powerpoints, I found myself again pondering what do you do when you a lecturer that does not like giving lectures? Don’t get me wrong I like teaching, it’s the “traditional” lecture I don’t like.
As for students, we heard the “horror” stories of 10 students turning up instead of XXX, which suggests students don’t like the “traditional” lecture either. Personally, when I go into “talking head” mode, I don’t blame my students for not attending, as I bore myself, neither do I blame the fact that my lectures get recorded (I see these as a positive, but that’s another post). So how do I get my students to come to lectures this semester?
I know what I want from lecturers, interaction, discussion, different points of view coming across. I know I teach better when I get this feedback from students, but receiving meaningful feedback from a room with hundreds of students is a challenge. Over the last few years, I have increasingly turned to Classroom Response Systems (CRS) to this, i.e. clickers, or polls/quizzes using portable devices. Most recently my CRS of choice is Poll Everywhere, mainly due to The University of Melbourne getting a campus-wide licence.
When I started to do this I read various guides on how to use a CRS and they all pretty standard, a poll or two at the start of class to test/reinforce pre-class work, a few during the class to test understanding and an exit poll. All up 5-7 questions, but is this interactive? Can you deliver an entire class through polls? I tried this last semester and now preparing for this semester I am reflecting on my experience once again.
I should point out I teach in the AIS/Intro audit space, transaction cycles, business processes are major topics. The undergrad subject I teach is called Accounting Information: Risks and Controls expected from the name, identifying risks and controlling for them is a major aspect. Due to this, I teach a lot with mini cases, and real-world examples, which I find lends itself to polling.
I break down the case into a series of questions to cover the learning objectives, for example, to identify risks I will give students a process (normally via flowchart) and ask which of the following risks are controlled for, select all that apply. E.g.
I want students to discuss with each other (effectively think-pair-share) but don’t mind if they work on their own. I need to give them time to think through, time for me to walk around and talk to students, before displaying what the common answers were, and if there is a correct or better answer what it is. No longer am I just down the front I can now interact with students myself.
To keep students engaged I plan to across the lecture, use a range of question types: MCQs, rank order, clickable images short answers or even the odd word cloud. I want to scaffold the questions by using different difficulties and taxonomies (knowledge, application and problem solving), ranging from the simple confidence building where everyone gets it right to the misperception busting question. With the misperception busting/difficult questions, students seeing that the majority of the cohort got something wrong provides students with a sense of comfort seeing they, not the only one making the same mistake. The students who get it right a sense of achievement. Need to be careful not to overdo these questions to discourage the class.
One nice feature about Poll Everywhere is the powerpoint plug-in, which allows me to re-insert the poll results back into my lecture slides so the break down is still available to students post lecture. The notes section for PowerPoint enables me to add explanations as to why the correct answer is the most appropriate. This is a feature I need to make more use of this semester to facilitate post class revision.
So what do I plan to do differently this semester? As not everything went right last semester.
- Make sure when asking a world cloud, make it clear to students I am looking for short answers, 2-3 words preferably one.
- When asking short answer questions make it clear I am looking for more than one word, and have a backup plan for the class(es) where the network is slow.
- Timing, not sure there is an answer to this one, standard time limits did not work, next to impossible to guess how much time students need. The best solution I found is watching the number of responses and when the number of responses to get close to what I expect and give the remaining students a verbal 3-second countdown.
- Explain that on “select all that apply” questions that the percentages shown are based on total responses, if every student selects the same three options, each option would show 33% it’s not (necessarily) 67% of the cohort getting a wrong answer!.
I’ve played around with a few different polling systems and found Poll Everywhere the most flexible due to the different types of questions. I started with Socrative but does not have the flexibility in question choice, and played with Kahoots which has a place but due to the time-based competition aspect does not support the deeper learning I am looking for and puts LOTE students at a disadvantage.
Is polling the answer to interactive lectures? No idea, but I think it helps. More importantly, I feel involved, I got an idea of what students are thinking, I feel like I am teaching/facilitating. If I feel this way, maybe students are willing to come to lectures and learn.
Are you using polls? I’d love to hear your thoughts and different polling options people might be using.
Matt Dyki
Matt is a Teaching Fellow at The University of Melbourne. Matt is involved in a number of initiatives around online accounting education. He has introduced innovations such getting students to use SAP and business simulations to provide an experimental learning experience.
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