This is how my school handled it, though I suspect the logistics are wildly different for a 20 person, 3 hour grad class and a 300+ person, 1 hour intro course. We only used them in a single course, so I’m glad that I didn’t have to shell out another 50 bucks for something that was used in maybe 3 or 4 sessions.
If there are studies showing that the clickers are a net good in the classroom, I think having the school provide them and making that a well known fact would be a positive and lead to more professors using them. And I have a hunch that a bulk order of however many thousand a school needs would drive the cost down vs. students buying their own.
I am well aware of lab fees, but that’s not each individual student buying a set of flasks, beakers, burners, NMR machine, and so on. In fact the lab fee is much better than having each student buy each piece of equipment.
It takes about 5 seconds to click in a unique identity code. In any event, if they’re grading students based on their clicking activity, I don’t see the efficacy in that.
I guess we can keep arguing about it - but if you think ~$40 (or less, used) for a device students use in multiple courses over multiple years is really a case of the university screwing the students, then I’m not likely to change your mind.
It’s worth noting that clickers are often used for formative assessment, not just quizzes. They can quickly reveal areas the classroom as a whole is lacking in mid lecture / activity, enabling dynamic response. IMO, just quizzing kids for an quick daily grade is about the most boring thing you can do with them.
They are? The clickers weren’t used for graded evaluation, they were used both as Armando mentioned and as another tool to guide the discussion (and if I’m being honest, I suspect we were also guinea pigs so the professor could understand the logistics and any difficulties that might pop up in a larger class).
Well, any class with hundreds of students in it is, IMO, a flop from the get-go. I’ve taught 400 person survey classes, and they suck. Hard. Even with seven teaching assistants and discussions sessions, the amount of actual “learning” that goes on is, IMO, infinitesimal. There are, I suppose, some disciplines or circumstances where a large class like that can actually accomplish something, but I’m rather skeptical.
The use of things like clickers can, as Armando points out, be beneficial, if used for something other than multiple choice tests (which, again IMO, are largely useless as a pedagogy). The logistics of handing them out and collecting them, though, should not be trivialized. Classes that meet twice a week are, generally, 75 minutes long for schools on a semester system. It’s a rare class that starts precisely on time and gets out precisely on time. Distributing and collecting clickers or anything else certainly would not help time management. I suppose you could issue them and have students return them at the end of the semester, sure. I think using cell phone apps is a more elegant solution, however. Leverage the tech students have, rather than introducing more costs and more things to the mix.
Of course, “guiding discussion” in a class so large you have to use clickers is sort of an oxymoron, ain’t it? You can’t have discussion with 300+ students.
True, you cannot have a discussion in a large class. But you can learn that 40% of students do not yet understand something and use that info to go back and re-cover something (hopefully in a different way). Even if 80 - 90% get an in-class question right, you can let the 10-20% know that they need to get help on that material.
And you can get students to discuss amongst themselves:
Not to trivialize it, but we routinely handed them out to 3000 people for 2-3 hr sessions and collected them afterwards. Yes there was inevitably some small loss, but that could be handled by a meager maintenance / replacement budget. And there was inevitably some fool or other who neglected to take one on arrival, so someone had to be ready to supply it when that person bleated.
But I totally agree the problem is easily solved by an app, either a free one or one which costs a few dollars. Far better than handing them out, and far better than selling the student a clicker which they can’t use for anything else and will never need again.
Definitely there are improvements in pedagogy to be had; that article (thanks!) does highlight some promising ideas. It remains to be seen how much traction they’ll get, but it does hold out some hope. I still remain committed to smaller classrooms as the best way to teach, well, anything, but higher ed is facing a lot of challenges and large classes are probably not going away any time soon, if ever. And some disciplines, perhaps the sciences as this article focuses on, may well be more suited than others for this approach. The key thing this article points out though is the importance of abandoning the unidirectional information flow model, regardless of class size.
That is true in a vacuum. But weighed against the costs of having students feel free to use their phone to shop or read reddit or watch cat videos? Again - you can buy the clickers used, which means you can also sell them.
Compared to the $250 textbooks we started out complaining about, I’m not seeing the big problem.
If the clicker is being used to judge their class participation, then it will quickly become evident that they aren’t paying attention, that they are watching cat videos instead. If the class is large, they can do that anyway, and if the class is small, you can see them watching cat videos, so you don’t need the clickers at all. In either case, the clicker is irrelevant to the question.
I’ve only seen clicker-style interaction in auditorium style venues once first hand. I actually feel that as long as you get over the cost/installation barrier (the setting i was in used an app) that they increase student / attendee engagement.
I think the pedagogical rationale for clickers is that it would allow students to test their knowledge without being judged, since the answers submitted are usually (if not always) anonymous. If a majority of the class picks the wrong answer the professor also has almost instant feedback that some aspect of their lecture has not been comprehended and can go back and drill down again.
My personal approach (YMMV) has evolved from trying to prevent students from using electronics in the classroom to embracing it. Over the past two decades, I’ve come to the conclusion that the energy spent (and antagonism created) by trying to hold back the tide simply isn’t worth it, while taking a two pronged approach of encouraging a sort of professionalism on the one hand and opening up opportunities to use phones and laptops constructively actually pays dividends. I have colleagues who routinely go as far as to collect all devices and put them in a basket until the end of class. If it works for them, cool. I just approach things a bit differently.
Of course, no one where I teach has a class more than about 25 or so students, either.
It has to be weird now too. I was in college just before smartphones existed, and texting was still a problem, but I think that when it comes to higher ed, you should have the mentality, “I am paying to be here” and actually get your money’s worth. I took extra classes to fill up my credit load each year just because I didn’t want to waste money (and those easier classes for my minor were good for the GPA)
Also, never buy textbooks until after the class starts. So many classes I took had required books that basically never were used, but the prof was required to list a textbook as part of the course. Our school also had textbooks you could use in the library for studying, and I found that was a good excuse to actually sit down and study un-distracted.
I am sure it has gotten tons worse than it was though, as textbooks were expensive in 2004, but often didn’t require a cd or online access code, that feels like a scam to me.
As someone who first entered college in ‘03 and went back in ‘12, I can assure you it got worse. So many have an online access code for the exercises and such, that would be impossible to take the class without. This was not the case in my first go round.
