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Recently "clickers"--a remote control-like personal response system universities are adopting in droves--have (quite literally) made the news. NPR ran a story on them, and The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only) provided an analysis of clicker economics and a critique of their use. (If you don't have a Chronicle subscription, Margaret Soltan of University Diaries provides the article in its entirety.)
So: Clickers--good or evil? That seems to be the question everyone is asking, and in many ways it's an annoying question. On the one hand, I think it's important to ask if clickers are useful in the first place. On the other hand, since they are being widely adopted, it's clear many faculty do find them useful in one way or another. The question then becomes, at least for teaching consultants like myself, "How can we ensure clickers are being used in a way that's pedagogically sound?" In particular, how might clickers improve students' experience in large-enrollment courses?
Near the end of the Chronicle article, Michael Bugeja writes,
I am still wary of clickers, and I asked professors in my unit if they were using them.
Jay Newell, who teaches advertising, consulted with his student advisory committee about using clickers in his large class. The students were against clickers, he observed: "One said that she and her friends would slow down lectures by inputting incorrect answers to poll questions. Another said that it was not unusual to have one student bring multiple clickers as a favor to friends in classes in which clicker responses were used to award credit."
I was intrigued that Newell had consulted with students and had created an advisory committee, an idea recommended by the same center for excellence in learning and teaching whose e-mail message triggered this essay.
And that's the moral of the story. Institutions have much to learn from students about the cost and effectiveness of technology. Chief information officers need to be consulted before departments invest in expensive for-profit consumer technologies. Professors need to realize that technology comes at a price, even when advertised as "free." Finally, administrators need to double their efforts at cost containment, demanding assessment before investment, especially in schemes that bypass mandated accountability standards.
Laura Blankenship (AKA Geeky Mom, whom I seem to be citing a lot these days) has a post about the importance of cost-benefit analysis in adopting new technologies to support teaching and learning.
I agree with both Bugeja and Blankenship: all parties at a university--students, faculty, IT folks, teaching centers, and administrators--must collaborate in selecting the best technologies for students. Too frequently, this isn't the case.
The best practices, it seems to me, for adopting clickers at a university include*:
- Having academic technology services (or IT or whatever department is in charge of these things at your institution) set up classroom pilots of clicker systems from several different vendors.
- Selecting from among these many vendors the clicker system that is most flexible, is platform agnostic (e.g. works on both Macs and PCs), and is inexpensive for students. This clicker system, and only this clicker system, would then be made available through the campus bookstore.
- Working with vendors to provide students with the best possible deal. In the best-case scenario, students would pay once for a clicker that they could use throughout their college years, and then sell it back (assuming the technology is still current) at similar buyback rates for textbooks (best case scenario: the bookstore pays 50% of the clicker's original cost to buy it back from the student). Students would not pay per-class or per-term for clicker service; there would only be the one-time purchase cost.
- Avoiding costly installation of clicker technology in classrooms. Instead, select a system that allows instructors to carry around a small box-type receiver that can be plugged into their laptops and easily receive feedback from student clickers, even if the clickers aren't in a direct line of sight from the box.
- Ensuring that faculty in adjacent classrooms could use clickers without interfering with one another's sessions. Clicker systems should be multichannel. If memory serves, the system at my university offers 13 simultaneous channels in a concentrated area.
- Training faculty on the systems prior to the start of the academic term, and having quick-response teams of academic technology experts who could be in a classroom within three minutes. Again, this is the goal of classroom technology support folks at my university, and it's larger than 5,000 acres, so I don't want to hear any complaining
