Encourage Audience Participation with a Proven Student Response System

Teachers are often responsible for 30 or more students at a time, and engaging all of them on a personal level can feel like a Herculean task. This problem was compounded by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many schools to switch to remote learning that prevented instructors from seeing the blank faces on zoning out pupils. If your organization is having a tough time engaging remote learners, fostering audience participation can be a great technique to try. We have created a suite of student response systems called Point Solutions to make interactive learning feasible for all learners and organizations. We recommend combining our student response system with other Echo360 family products such as Dojo360, Echo360, and ExamView for the best results.

What Does a Student Response System Do?

A student response system is designed to allow learners to participate in discussions, presentations, and lectures on a wide scale and without holding up the rest of the class. There's nothing wrong with encouraging students to raise their hand when they have a question, but the time constraints of most lecture environments mean that the instructor may need to move on before the asker is ready. Worse, students who already understand the material may mentally tune out when their instructor starts explaining something for the umpteenth time.

Student response systems such as our suite of Point Solutions products allow instructors to take advantage of Anywhere Polling to collect real-time feedback from all learners quickly and easily. Questions can be presented on their own, integrated into multimedia elements such as slides and video, or as quizzes to minimize classroom disruption. At the same time, teachers can visualize student responses and adapt their lesson plans to accommodate them. For example, it's probably worth backtracking a bit if 80% of the class failed to answer a question on Mendelian genetics or logarithmic functions correctly.

Of course, interactivity doesn't have to be limited to factual questions. An instructor could create a poll asking learners what they thought of a new PowerPoint presentation, helping them improve the lesson for the future. Our test generation software, ExamView, makes it easy to write effective prompts for a variety of use cases. The class could also be divided into teams to add gamification to test review or even learning new concepts. Our suite of Point Solutions products can even automate administrative tasks such as taking attendance and awarding credit for participation, allowing instructors to focus on teaching. You can export all of the data you collect to your LMS to make it easier to track academic growth as well.

How Do Students Interact with a Student Response System?

Most learners prefer to answer poll questions on their mobile devices, giving them a good reason to look at their tablet or smartphone during a lecture. However, learners who don't own a device can still participate via web browser or a dedicated student response clicker, ensuring that all learners have an equal opportunity to answer poll questions. This can be especially valuable for introverted learners who may feel more comfortable answering questions anonymously than raising their hands.

There are many approaches to interactive learning and real-time polling is only one of them. For instance, our learning engagement platform is called Dojo360 and includes video chat capabilities and threaded message boards to help synchronous and asynchronous learners collaborate on assignments. Likewise, Echo360 is our video content management platform that unleashes the learning potential of video through ASR (Automated Speech Recognition) technology. All video content is automatically transcribed, allowing students to read along with a lecture and access a searchable index of content when they want to review.

How Can I Learn More about Your Student Response System?

If you would like to learn more about the capabilities of our suite of Point Solutions products or any of our other services, contact us for further information. We look forward to answering any lingering questions you may have.