What are the alternative methods and technologies to the PRS handsets we've
bought? In fact this is all part of a wider set of choices.
Our own approach at Glasgow university adopted the position:
The ideal system for this would allow huge groups of students to register a
response to a MCQ (multiple choice question) with privacy (secret ballot), and
have the results immediately summarised, and the summary displayed.
Feedback to individual students (e.g. by LCDs on handsets) could be nice.
Best of all would be to escape the MCQ strategy and have open-ended input from
each audience member.
Besides these web pages containing our views, there are some other reports on
what technology to adopt:
MacGregor,J., Cooper,J.L., Smith,K.A. & Robinson,P. (2000)
Strategies for energizing large classes: From small groups to learning
communities (Josey-Bass: San Francisco)
Given the use of MCQs as the way to involve student interaction, there
are other ways that are possible and in fact have been heavily used in the
recent past and present.
- Students raise their hands.
- Small cubes, either cardboard or plastic, with each face a different
colour. Students turn the colour corresponding to their choice to face the
front. One version of these are
CommuniCubes,
available from Keele. Stephen Bostock says of them:
"We have one portable electronic voting kit at Keele but more staff prefer to
use the cubes, which are freely available within my institution. We sell them
at a steady rate to other institutions, £1.50 each."
- "Flash cards": each student equipped with (say) 6 cards, each with a big
letter "A" to "F"; on a question being issued, they hold up the card
representing the option they vote for.
[Meltzer,D.E. & Manivannan,K. (1996) "Promoting interactivity in physics
lecture classes" The physics teacher vol.34 no.2 p.72-76 ]
- A sheet of paper is divided into, say, 10 squares each with a different
large digit printed. Students hold these up to face the front, and point to
the digit they select to indicate their choice.
There have been, and perhaps still are, cases where particular rooms
have had systems installed based on wiring rather than wireless technology.
Some examples of this are described in the History section at the end of this
page. Nowadays the installation or even the cable costs of such systems would
outweigh those of wireless ones, besides being tied to a single room.
This section lists non-computer special electronic handset voting systems that
support MCQs. Non-MCQ systems, that allow open-ended responses from the
audience, are discussed in a later section.
And don't forget the alternative of using computers: one PC per student
(discussed in this paper) and in a section
below.
The price information below is out of date, but as of March 2008 I cleaned up
a lot of the rest of it. Still, even an out of date starting point is better
than none for people looking for a vendor.
For another view you could look at this
5 Aug 2005 news article by news.com, and
3 ads.
The article also reports that
"U.K market research firm DTC Worldwide, which tracks the global market for
education technology, expects that 8 million clickers ... will be sold
annually by 2008".
Comparing different hardware: list of reviews on the web.
- We originally bought our equipment from PRS: their software is free
(though the source code is not available, or so we thought ...), but you buy
handsets and receivers. The company that used to sell this in the UK was
Varitronix.
The company that produced it was Educue.
They have now been bought by
GTCO Calcomp.
- eInstruction
is currently (March 2008) the parent company for PRS equipment.
It owns GTCO Calcomp which has
Interwrite Learning
as a division, and bought Educue
(the original creator of PRS).
Interwrite produces a range of hardware and software, including
the new versions of PRS. I understand the next version, due out around Easter
2008, will be called "Interwrite SRS". It will run on PCs, Macs, and Linux;
and deal with all, and all mixtures of, IR, RF, and "virtual" handsets.
- Banxia
(phone: 0845 108 2994)
is a UK firm (based in Kendal, Cumbria) partnered with GTCO Calcomp to sell
their products in the UK, but it also produces its own hardware and software for
EVS and for other things. Thus they sell InterWrite PRS/SRS and Impact
Explorer (their own software - which has a different set of capabilities and
complements the PRS offering, but which also works with the PRS keypads). They
support infra-red and radio frequency keypads including (currently) the PRS
infra red and radio frequency keypads, ResponsePad infra red keypads (their
own brand) and Fleetwood Worldwide radio frequency keypads. I know a number of
people who have bought from them. Banxia pride themselves on being EVS
specialists (as opposed to selling EVS as one small example of audio-visual
equipment).
Thus there are now several alternative pieces of software you might use with the
same EVS handset hardware.
- Their original software (PC only)
http://www.educue.com/form.htm
- Their new software, based on Java, runs on Macs as well.
http://www.educue.com/support/software.php
-
RxShow
(PC only) by Socratec.
This was once independent; then had a link with H-ITT; now I can't find any link
to it.
- Banxia's software
Impact Explorer which can be used with various keypads.
- Glasgow's home brew software "Respon" and "QRS" by Chris Mitchell.
- Similarly some other available (hardware) keypad systems, which can
often be used in conjunction with the various software options above, are:
- Turningpoint.
Some UK universities have recently bought this.
Feature rich software. Can be used with other hardware, or using an applet
called vPad it can be put on to PDAs or PCs instead of handsets, or use their
own ResponseCard hardware.
-
Promethean
are the interactive whiteboard people based in Blackburn, but they also sell
EVS kit ("Activexpression") and software which handles open ended text input
surprisingly well.
A large project
"REVEAL" at the
University of Wolverhampton involved using their kit in many schools and would
give you more information.
-
WordWall
(a.k.a. Visual Education ltd.) are a small company with its own EVS software,
currently selling mainly to schools. Designed as a new interface to
interactive whiteboards, this has led to some new approaches for EVS handsets
too, both visually on the projector screen and in the student interaction
modes. The software seems to me to have some interesting features: see
next para. It is not yet geared up to big lecture theatre sizes, but this
could change. Contact Josh Smith 0207 099 4363 or js@wordwallweb.com
"WordPads work with the proprietary WordWall interactive whiteboard
interface, although you can run it as a Powerpoint overlay. It
supports a much wider range of interactions than other systems.
Multiple-choice tests can be run through the handset screen, so
students can answer at their own pace. It's also the only EVS to
support text contribution using phone-style predictive texting and
offers a multilingual interface in 12 different languages. Students
can also offer opinions via Lickert scales, definition match-up,
odd-one-outs and category quizzes. Students can use joypad controls to
indicate preference and there are also a variety of different game
modes.
Pads cost £28 each [as of May 2009], although discounts are available for
large sets. Although initially aimed at school classrooms, they have recently
added functionality to support larger, lecture-sized sets."
- H-ITT: Hyper Interactive Teaching Technology
It would seem this is the cheapest on the market. However it has 5 not 10
answer buttons on their handsets. Prices seem to be roughly $22.50
per handset; $180 per receiver; software free. They say it is now
10 times faster than before, and
in a test collected 200 votes
in 10 seconds, which is indeed 10 times faster than our experience with PRS.
Use browser "Find" command to search for "Improving speed".
They are clearly aimed at students purchasing a personal handset.
They believe it scales up to big rooms: 1200 students with 2 screens going.
It is unclear whether the feedback is legible with these numbers (no
information on font size). Their approach to feedback is to have a fixed
screen position for each handset. There seems to be a UK user of H-ITT at
Warwick.
- Classtalk. Now obsolete and not
available, but good. Used cabling not wireless at least originally.
- CPS from E-instruction.
E-instruction has now merged with Interwrite (see above).
- Discourse
from ETS.
Appears to be discontinued.
- Teamworker
from Decision Dynamics.
Radio, LCD feedback on handsets, powerpoint use, 128 handsets maximum.
Say £15,000 UKP for an 80 handset set.
- IML audience voting systems.
Radio, LCD on handsets, no prices easily available. I hear it costs about
£250 per handset! Also the software requires a dongle, and this means the
computer running it can't be networked.
On the other hand, the audience can submit free text messages; the handsets
can store a set of answers and submit them as a bunch (which is probably much
better for class tests), and the handsets also have a built-in microphone
to facilitate discussion from the audience to the whole class.
Used in the medical school in Cardiff:
paper and
web site.
Apparently you have to use their software for the questions, and this was too
difficult for lecturers in practice.
Also now in use at University of Central Lancashire.
- LearnTrac.
Their website and press pack has no technical information and no prices.
Seems to be another MCQ wireless system.
- Extol system 8: very expensive, but available.
Possible link
- Mentergy
(formerly Gilat Communications - its parent, Gilat Satellite is one
of the leading providers of satellite connectivity).
Apparently the University of Derby uses something they are very pleased with
from them, with a voting system as part of a telepresence system.
- mediastation
£3,900 for a 20 handset kit.
- Educlick
Once was: 15 handsets £900.
- Interactive Presenter
is software made by Dolphin who also do the hardware, both infrared and radio.
(
about Interactive Presenter.)
Apparently no price information on their website, but they will send a price
list: very, very roughly, about 90 pounds per infrared handset (excluding both
+VAT and -Academic Discount), and a little more for radio.
A UK contact for them is
Paul Brown
01291 629379. He also says: "I also have contact with academic institutions
in providing the Interactive Presenter on a one-off basis where they want to
conduct a particular piece of research using audience voting. A web-published
example of one these projects can be found at
http://www.peter-murray.net/chiradinfo/marwell04/marwellreportv01p04.htm."
- Questionmark
and their software "Perception" are mainly about computerised assessment
(testing students). So for authoring questions in many formats (not just
basic MCQs), they may have something to offer. Possibly, such questions could
then be asked using an EVS.
- qwizdom.
About £50 per handset, including share of receivers etc.
This uses IR, but has a 2-way communication with handsets, which have 2 LEDs
indicating when their message has been received. There was a limit of 256 in
the number of handsets in one audience (but this may be overcome now).
The speed is said to be very high when large numbers of responses are sent at once: what our investigations suggest is that if many send at once, the
equipment organises re-sending itself, so users do not have to press more than
once, and all votes are received fairly quickly (a few seconds) so in practice
the vote gathering for large numbers is much better than with PRS.
It also allows students to
signal for help: an electronic way of putting up their hand, but more
discreet. They are bringing out a radio (as opposed to infrared) version soon
(?maybe in February 2005) which will support free text input from each
audience member. A contact is Gary Morrison 028 90 485 015,
(gary@qwizdom.co.uk).
- keepad. Australian. RF, new entry
for HE EVS market.
- Research Machines also selected Qwizdom and will sell them to you.
- ppvote (renamed from "Option
technologies Limited") is a UK company. Said to be good at integration with
Powerpoint. Rental available. No prices or even useful descriptions of products
on their website.
They sell on clickapad radio keypads:
- clickapad radio keypads,
by another UK company (01252 699 650/600).
Indicative prices seem to be 50 or 80 pounds plus VAT per handset, plus
460 pounds plus VAT for a receiver set. They are thus in the region of twice
the price of infrared systems.
- The Reply IQ keypad system
and Turning Point software packages made by Fleetwood (in USA) is a radio
based system with UK dealers e.g.:
TeamTalk in Milton Keynes.
I hear they have been sold to at least one UK university.
Prices seem to be about 5 times the cheapest infrared systems.
- The Perception Analyzer
from msinteractive.
Designed firstly for marketing research.
Has a single analogue dial, and the idea is for the user to move this
continually to indicate their response to each point as some stimulus (an
advertisement or speech) is played. Uses radio, and has 2-way communication,
with a small LED display on the handsets typically showing what the current
scale is.
- N.B.
"Quizmo"
sold for only 7 pounds per handset, but seems to have the quizzes prestored
in the handset, and presented to the user by books (purchased separately).
So no infrared link, but the software built in. These couldn't be used in the
classroom, but might indicate how cheap handsets could become in principle.
The key function that MCQ-oriented technology cannot cover is allowing
open-ended (e.g. free text) input from each audience member, rather than just
indicating a selection from a small, fixed set of alternatives.
However it is important to think, not just that MCQs are a limited way of
asking questions, but what on earth a presenter in front of an audience of
several hundred could possibly do with hundreds of free text inputs. The
great virtue of MCQs is that great numbers of answers can be summarised in a
single, simple summary (e.g. a bar or pie chart), whereas it would take a
human not a computer, and considerable time, to group free text answers into
"similar" points.
For that reason, I long assumed that EVS couldn't usefully do open ended text
input, because the presenter and audience couldn't do anything with it.
However Promethean have gone a considerable way to proving me wrong. Their
handsets allow text input similar to mobile phones, and crucially their
software supports the presenter in using it. One mode provides a set of 8?
blank boxes on the screen and as the words (or possibly phrases) come in, the
presenter uses the mouse to sort these into the boxes (thus grouping variant
spellings, synonyms etc. together); then a followup MCQ vote could be taken
directly from that screen with each box being an optional response. With an
audience of 30 this only takes a few seconds and works very well.
This allows a 2 phase student feedback quiz to be done very fast: you first
ask (free text mode) "what is the thing you struggle with most on the
course?", quickly group similar answers, then re-vote to check which really
is the top issue for the group.
Even with 300 something can be done: it provides a list of the received words
with a frequency count against each word. With big numbers it doesn't matter
losing a few percent to deviant spellings etc., or ignoring words that only
one person put in: you probably only want the popular (high frequency) ones
anyway.
However if you do want this function, then the most obvious method is to teach
in rooms or labs with a computer per student (or at least per group of
students); and use the network instead of infrared to interact. If the
computers use wireless networking, then the system could be mobile and
flexible. (See this discussion.)
Other specialised equipment however allows some of this.
-
Texas Instruments "Navigator" calculators are apparently another way to
go, though more expensive. They have 2-way communication as they can be
networked, and so "voting" can be done through them. Successor to Classtalk.
For some years, in nearly every talk or workshop on EVS, someone would
suggest that it could all be done using texting on the mobile phones very
nearly all students carry. In 2008, an MIT startup company
Poll Everywhere created by Jeff
Vyduna (jvyduna AT sloan.mit.edu) offered this service (which is not yet
available in the UK). Here is a discussion about the apparent prospects and
problems with this approach.
The service provided seems to be:
A short text number to dial (41411)
Msg content each voter types in of the form "CAST 10082"
Votes caught, processed, put on a web page that can be displayed in the
talk. And embedded in powerpoint.
Votes from SMS and the web can be combined.
(Also can download spreadsheet form of the data)
First, the attractions are large: a speaker need only arrange and pay for the
service in advance, and have a live internet (WWW) connection in the lecture
theatre (actually still quite difficult and rare in my university), but they
can reasonably assume most of the audience will come with their "handset" i.e.
mobile phone, and no other equipment or setup is necessary on the spot.
PollEverywhere also says their software is integrated with PowerPoint.
However there are several issues, in fact drawbacks, with this.
- Each voter will have to make about a dozen key presses, compared to one
for basic handsets. Although this is an order of magnitude more work, it may
not really matter to users.
- The technology may not be up to it even in principle.
- Mobile phone networks were not originally designed to handle 200 calls
from a single room at once. This is not a fundamental technical barrier, but
it will rule out some off-the-shelf technologies that would otherwise be
suitable.
- Bluetooth is apparently not able to handle 300 in a room.
- Cell phone networks are not designed for this:
For audiences of 300 (say) there is probably not enough cell capacity in any
location.
A cell can handle 168 concurrent calls on digital cellular networks, 56 on
analogue (see
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/cell-phone2.htm).
Concurrency will work differently for texting, so those figures are naive,
but the phones may need to resend the message until they get a positive
acknowledgment which adds latency. This is particularly so because it has been
suggested that a phone system could be attacked maliciously by a flood of SMS
messages, which if big enough would overwhelm the control channels, and
prevent voice service as well as SMS from working in that area/cell. This
means that it is likely the service provider will have defences that would
prevent large voting audiences.
Even if coverage could be obtained, SMS messages, unlike voice calls but like
emails, are not guaranteed to be instantaneous or to be delivered within any
specific time. Texts can be and in practice often are delayed, and there are
no prospects for an archictecture to allow text delivery for a vote within a
guaranteed time (e.g. 2 minutes; 2 seconds for the best EVS equipment). But
not only is this prompt delivery not guaranteed, it is frequently not
delivered as the only published trial (see below) showed.
- The service charging models are inappropriate.
We probably can't arrange for the voting to be free to students, since they
all use different providers. Local cells are expensive, and they will not be
private but will fall under an existing licence and operator (i.e Vodafone, O2
etc) who has paid for that part of the radio spectrum. Charging students to
participate is not a good way to get this approach off the ground, even if it
wouldn't matter in a mature model.
- It will be some time before everyone has one in educational settings
(though mobile phone ownership is about 98% among our undergraduates
currently), yet it will be a long time before they are cheaper than PRS
handsets. On the other hand a mixed policy might be within reach: e.g. assume
90% of the audience bring their own (this might already work for mobile
phones, headphones, and walkmen music players), and supply the other 10%
(only).
Matt Jones (always@acm.org) has a paper on trying SMS mobile phone
text messaging in this way:
Jones,M. & Marsden,G. (2004)
"'Please turn ON your mobile phone'
-- First impressions of text-messaging in lectures"
(University of Waikato, Computer Science Tech Report (07/2004))
In that study:
- 1-38% of the audience voted (as opposed to 90-100% with PRS)
- 19% of texts to MCQs were not correctly parsed by the software
- 6% of all texts received were spam (in South Africa)
- 5-10% of messages didn't arrive till the vote was over.
(This may have been deliberate anti-SPAM blocking by the network operator.)
- Students were concerned about the cost to them
Nevertheless, the students were favourable to this. So it is feasible if you
don't mind only a minority voting successfully.
Summary: how to decide if to adopt this technology
Much of the cost is retained by the presenter/university, but students may
be charged for the texts by their mobile phone service provider.
It seems likely that a considerable proportion will not have their votes
"heard", especially in large audiences. There isn't much useful data on this
that I have found so far, and what there is doesn't look good.
Especially in large audiences, missing some votes doesn't seem to
matter at first thought: everyone knows what (they thought) they voted,
everyone sees how that relates to the group votes.
However, it quickly undermines the meaning: as people realise their votes aren't
seen, they lose motivation, can't trust the summaries in the same way, etc.
And the presenter too is increasingly misled, along with the audience;
particularly if the missing votes are not random, but are the last (and
perhaps most thoughtful) section of the audience.
The paradox, or rather cleft stick, is that:
This technology is significantly easier to start up and set up
especially for one-off presenters and audiences.
BUT for such uses, the strong tendency is to use quick questions that
require no thinking: and then the longer key press sequences and potentially
long latency times will matter more than they would for mature, regular
educational uses where longer thinking times are required of the auidence, and
slower equpment response times become less problematic.
In 2002 near future solutions look like including using text messaging from
mobile phones (see previous section), or with all audience members having a
PDA (personal digital assistant i.e. palm-top computer) with wireless
networking. See also this system for voting from pocket PCs:
class in hand.
Mark Finn has
a journal paper reviewing projects to date that have used PDAs in teaching.
I'm interested in having a history of classroom voting technology; and putting
it here. I repeatedly hear rumours about a "system just like that": these (so
far) turn out to be wired (as opposed to wireless) handset-equipped lecture
theatres. Such systems are of course not mobile but tied to particular rooms,
and support only MCQs, not open-ended responses from the audience.
A comment suggested by John Cowan and in different words by Willie Dunn, is
that these systems represented a first effort towards engaging with learning
rather than teaching. Their importance was perhaps more that shift: and when the
equipment, or more generally feedback classrooms, were abandoned, it was as much
to take the underlying change in attitude further into new forms than a step
backwards.
- From 1947 until 2000 a small group of science lecturers in Holland and
Belgium have used a one-button system. This is hardwired (cable not infrared),
and each student has a single button, while the public display of a result is
the percentage responding to the current question. This is directly useful
for "have you understood" questions, but MCQs are handled by asking each
response option in turn (there is essentially no delay in collecting the
answers for each poll, provided the students are ready to answer). There is
also empirical data on the improvement to exam pass rates that this has
supported:
J.Poulis, C.Massen, E.Robens, & M.Gilbert (1998)
"Physics lecturing with audience paced feedback"
Am.J.Physics vol.66 pp.439-441.
They have had a string of other papers, mostly not in English, e.g.:
- Poulis, J.A.: "Onbegripsmeetkunde"
Van der Waals koerier (1969) 9, 5-7.
- Poulis, J.A., Massen, C.H., Robens, E.:
"Rationalisierung der Hochschulausbildung mit Audience Paced Feedback"
Das Hochschulwesen, (1993) 2, 56 + 91-92.
- Poulis, J.A., Massen, C.H., Robens, E.:
"Statistische Untersuchungen über Audience Paced Feedback (APF)"
Das Hochschulwesen 43 (1995) 1, 51-52.
- Poulis, J.A., Massen, C.H., Monhemius, W., Robens, E.
"Audience Paced Feedback (Teil 2)"
Hochschulausbildung, (1989) 2, 113-116.
- J.A. Poulis, C.H. Massen, E. Robens: APF
"Lernen mit dem Klingelknopf"
Wirtschaft & Weiterbildung 8 (1995) 4, 77.
- J.A. Poulis, C.H. Massen, U. Frank, E. Robens
"APF - Interaktiver Unterricht und CDI-AUD(itiv) - Interaktiver Selbstunterricht"
Personal 48 (1996) 3, 141-143.
- E. Robens, J.A. Poulis, C.H. Massen "Lernen mit dem Klingelknopf"
Bunsen-Magazin 2 (2000) 123-124.
The system was used in four places, the largest room having 300 student
places:
The choice of one button was deliberate: "the psychologist Prof. Dr. Daniels
stressed the point that not more than one button per student should be used".
At least in its heyday, student enthusiasm brought official support for it.
However after 2000, it ceased to be used.
My information on this comes from the publications and personal communications
from the authors.
- Darwin Hunt,
in 1962 at New Mexico State University, instrumented a
classroom with about 30 places so that each student was given one hand-held
button, which he/she was told to press when they were not understanding the
lecture. These buttons were connected by wires to a meter mounted on the
lecture podium which displayed the percentage of students who were pressing
their buttons at any one moment. When the needle on the meter reached too
high a percentage, say 20%, then the lecturer would stop and try to remedy the
apparent lack of understanding by class discussion. (This is mentioned in
Hunt,D.P. (1982) "Effects of human self-assessment responding on learning"
Journal of applied psychology vol.67 pp.75-82; and in
an unpublished paper "Human self assessment: Theory and application to learning
and knowledge measurement" (1992/2004).)
Its use did not spread to other teaching faculty there.
The original theoretical notion here was essentially control engineering: it
was to get better (and faster) feedback to the teacher. This turned out to be,
for him, the start of a line of research on learning and understanding e.g.
Hunt, D. (1982) "Effects of human self-assessment responding on learning"
Journal of Applied Psychology vol.67 pp.75-82.).
- Appleby, E. C. (1968). "Teaching Aids and the Practitioner."
Veterinary Record vol.83 no.12 pp.291-292
Mentions a machine in use at the time at the Veterinary College in London
where each student's desk in a lecture theatre has a 5-position dial for
responding to MCQs presented on an OHP. A panel on the podium gave totals
for each response. Based on an American idea, it says.
Bridgman, C. F. (1965) "Innovations in the Teaching of Anatomy."
American Journal of Veterinary Research vol.26 no.115 pp.1552-1561
This paper both describes the equipment and the pedagogical rationale. It was
applied to a class of 120 Veterinary students learning anatomy at UCLA.
Students had a 5-way choice (MCQs with up to 5 alternative responses).
Results only visible initially to the lecturer.
Totals for each response, plus in fact all responses (so possible to go back to
individual students). Equipment obviously tied to one room.
The paper gives views of the advantages of this approach that are very similar
to ours: alert students due to active participation, feedback to students,
feedback to lecturers on how well the material is getting across, which
allows them "to branch into new explanations".
- Stanford had a Large-Group Instruction Room with 'student responders' in
the late 1960s. See ch.4 (p.99) of Larry Cuban (2001)
Oversold & Underused: Computers in the Classroom (Harvard Univ Press).
"... in 1981 when I returned to Stanford to teach ...the student responders
were still there but had become a harmless anachronism that an occasional
professor could cite as an example of a passing technological fad ...".
Late 1960s, in the school of Education, 160 seat audience, each pad had 1-10
digits, plus Y,N,O. Planned to be used for audience feedback (not content
MCQs), and only speaker would see data. Room also had full TV studio
facilities. By 1972 the EVS was already disused and nonfunctional, and the TV
only occasionally used. In 2001, keypads still there, still not used. Only 2
of 35 teaching staff had ever used it.
Ref given: Chronicle of HE 16 June 1993 pp.A2-A3.
- Jim Boyle has anecdotal evidence of a system built in the 1960's in
Singapore and also in Sweden.
- At the University of Glasgow around about 1970, two PhD students
(George Stenhouse and John Womersley) in the then Department of Physiology
devoted a Long Vacation to constructing a feedback system in the West Medical
Building lecture theatre. They say they were inspired by the educational
ideas of Willie Dunn. It served about 200 students
[currently the reconstructed room seats 279]; definitely they had 4 buttons
each and both green (reward) and red (admonition) signal lights. The lecturer
had to pre-program his console with the right answer-code (A-D), to activate
the response signal lights, and the console would subsequently tell him the
percentage of answers cast for each letter in turn. The console also had an
array of lights that allowed the lecturer to identify respondents.
The idea was that 4-choice MCQs would be posed via the OHP at 4-6 moments
within a lecture. Ideally each followed on from material presented in the
preceding 5-10 minutes, to test whether the listeners had sufficiently
absorbed the principles to be able to select the right answer to a deductive
follow-up question. As was standard with such MCQs, one wrong answer offered
was reasonable, the other two seriously off beam. At least five or six
lecturers used it quite extensively, and it was demonstrated at a meeting of
the Physiological Society.
The system was built out of second hand Post Office relays, and suffered
scuffing and other wear in the six or so years after the installers left,
and was eventually condemned on Health and Safety grounds, I guess a little
before 1980, and stripped out by contractors -- who, I believe, charged
more than the funds required by the two installers, who had merely covered
their S/H purchases. In fact unreliability was a problem (often a few of
the student sets would not be working on a given day.
[Information from Neil Spurway, John Womersley, and Sheila Jennett; and
Willie Dunn]
Here's what Willie Dunn, who they say inspired their implementation, has
to say now about the rationale:
The basic thinking was to improve the efficiency of the lecture in
situations where the students have partial knowledge. For example, suppose we
have an expert meeting with a group of GPs as part of a continuing
professional education programme. He could give a pre-prepared lecture, but
would that meet the needs of the GPs? We might have identified a general need,
but what of more specific needs, say about treatments.
If the GPs are presented with a series of cases and make decisions about
actions, if the expert agrees with the decision made then he can move on
quickly until he finds an area of need, and his contributions become
problem-oriented as far as the GPs are concerned. And there is plenty
evidence supporting problem-oriented learning.
We had systems the operated with small groups: a 10-student version was
constructed and used before the lecture theatre was equipped (later with
computers), and the physiology adventure was an attempt to bring some of the
best in small group situations into a large group. I used to teach a class of
200 in the lecture theatre.
Later on we came to distinguish between topics which were a focus for
speculation and those which were an object of mastery. In the latter the GPs
were interested in what the expert had to say because he was the master, but
with the other topics there was no scientifically-determined correct answer
and GPs were interested in what their peers had to say as much as the
opinion of the expert, and such systems allowed us to do this.
A number of variations on this theme were developed. However we found that
the technology of the time was not reliable enough or cheap enough to continue
the hardware development at that time, and we switched to cheaper and more
reliable (but less flexible systems). But along came computer systems from
the mid-seventies and many of these ideas were incorporated into our work in
this field.
-
At Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh there was a "feedback classroom",
probably from 1972 for about 5 years, used mainly by John Cowan.
[This information comes from John Cowan, edited by Steve Draper.]
It was in Civil Engineering, in what was then the Darien Building and was not
used by students in other departments.
The lecture room, not theatre, was capable of accommodating about 50 students
and was fitted out to enable it to be used as a feedback classroom. This was
done by bolting electrical trunking, about 80mm x 40 mm, to the head of long
flat desks, large enough to take drawing boards when the room was used as a
drawing office. At each student position there was a hole in the trunking,
facing the student, fashioned with a porthole from a shop supplying parts for
model ships. On top of the trunking was a knob with pointer, which could be
turned to one of six or seven positions. The positions were labelled
alphabetically. Four were for MCQ responses, the others for things like "I
didn't understand this at all, and don't want to respond"; and there was also
an "Off" position, for an unused seat, or for use when someone could not
answer the question posed.
All of this was connected electronically to a simple control panel at the
front of the class, which enabled the lecturer to switch between options and
find out how many of the students were responding under each heading. The
lecturer clicked on the correct answer, and those who had returned it were
rewarded with a reasonably confidential light showing through the porthole.
It was (deliberately) not possible to identify which student was giving which
response. There was no public display, but public reporting by lecturer.
The apparatus was used to enable a lecturer to pose
multiple choice questions in class, give time for the students to choose
an answer, and obtain feedback about assimilation - and also the
attractiveness of the various distractors. The lecturer could then
respond accordingly - or as he thought likely to be suitable.
The main effects, which were not inconsiderable, were to reveal lack of
understanding beyond what the lecturer had anticipated, and enable
something to be done about it right away; to identify relatively common
misunderstandings; and to open up the dialogue so that the "lecture"
moved a little towards being a learning activity, in which students
reported understanding and puzzlement.
It was used mainly by the initiator, John Cowan, but 2-3 others explored it as
an option, rather than building it in. It had two possible disadvantages for
the "explorers" - it called for additional preparation, and it showed up
weaknesses in one's teaching of which one might otherwise be unaware.
It was used for about 5 years and then abandoned partly because the initiator
changed jobs and site, but mainly because
"I wasn't really into lecturing to classes any more".
John Cowan: "It originated in a visit to Jim Cowan (no relation) at Watsons
College (for schoolboys), through a chance contact arising from boys' club
work and a conversation about innovations in teaching and learning. I had
mentioned my desire to know what was being assimilated, rather than what I
delivered. He told me he had this commercial feedback classroom, and invited
me to go and see it in use. The theoretical idea was the first stirring of
wanting to know what learning was happening in activities for which I was
responsible."
It is mentioned in John Cowan's PhD ("The Feasibility of Resource-Based
Learning in Civil Engineering Education" Heriot-Watt University, 1975), but
otherwise unpublished.
- The Scottish Parliament
- The equipment in the TV show "Who wants to be a millionaire?".
Web site logical path:
[www.psy.gla.ac.uk]
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