The widespread and largely accelerated use of smart technology among the youth of today can be subject to widespread criticism, particularly within the education industry. Students are more likely to be playing on their phones rather than actively engaging with content. In addition, attendance can be notoriously low; especially for those “early” morning, 9 am lectures. This is frustrating for tutors and detrimental to students’ learning experience.
As most people would agree, it can be difficult to sit still and stay engaged for prolonged periods; studies have suggested that students’ attention span during lectures is between 10 – 15 minutes. So why not allow students to be part of the lecture rather than a fly on the wall by utilising student response solutions?
Features
For example, polls are a great way to keep the room engaged. If used during planned intervals, they are an asset to ensure that the whole room is retaining focus. Build an icebreaker poll right at the beginning of the session to kick start engagement from the get-go. Tailoring lectures around the responses from across the room is a sure way to keep those concentration levels up.
Many student response systems offer assistance in content distribution. Gone are the days of students trying to locate lecture notes each week or in the run-up to the exam period. With platforms such as Glisser, lecturers are able to live slide share their presentations directly to students devices in real time. Moreover, students have the additional benefit of personalised digital notes alongside the corresponding content slide. This will lead to the following benefits:
- Enable students to have all content and digital notes sent to their student email addresses streamlining the content dissemination process.
- Allow students to focus on what is being said by lecturers rather than just jotting down the bullet points.
- Prevents students from bombarding lecturers for slides and/or saving the lecturer the hassle of uploading content to a learning management system.
Gamify!
Student response systems enable the gamification of learning materials.
Quiz polls can be a great way to wrap up a session or using them throughout a lecture to help keep students attention whilst at the same time providing insights for the lecturer.
A quiz leader-board feature encourages competition amongst students, helping to spur participation and break the monotony of a continuous presentation. Not only will this provide a fun and interactive means of testing students, it will also establish what areas of the content that need to be revisited by the lecturer at another date. All the data captured throughout the session is available at the lecturer's discretion. It’s also a perfect way to identify and reach out to a specific student that are falling behind their peers.
Lecturers can further utilise polls as a means to gain feedback from students at the end of lecturers. For example, utilise Glisser’s star rating poll to gauge an understanding of how valuable students felt that the session was to their learning experience. Then follow up with a free text poll to add additional comments/ improvements that could be made to a session. This could be done at the end of every semester helping to enhance teaching techniques into the future and the entire learning experience.
Student response systems allow for the collection of a digital timestamp of individual attendance and participation in a seminar or lecture, making paper copied registers obsolete and avoiding dud register entries.
Pro Tip! - You can even add a password to the content allowing only the individuals in the room to have access to the content and download this at the end. No attendance? No lecture slides. It's a great way to keep attendance levels high.
