Classroom clickers catch on

UA instructors, students embracing handheld devices

NWA Media/DAVID GOTTSCHALK - 9/17/14 - Haley Martin, from right to left, from Fayetteville, a senior at the University of Arkansas, Bethany Smith, a sophomore from Little Rock and Emily Gray, a sophomore from Denton Tx., use a clicker as they answer practice test questions in the General Microbiology class of Tim Kral Wednesday September 17, 2014.
NWA Media/DAVID GOTTSCHALK - 9/17/14 - Haley Martin, from right to left, from Fayetteville, a senior at the University of Arkansas, Bethany Smith, a sophomore from Little Rock and Emily Gray, a sophomore from Denton Tx., use a clicker as they answer practice test questions in the General Microbiology class of Tim Kral Wednesday September 17, 2014.

Remote transmitter technology is becoming more common in the classroom at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, but not without a learning curve for faculty members and some cost to students.

Hand-held devices known as "clickers" allow students to respond to quizzes and polls or to signal their attendance in class. Each battery-powered device, roughly the size of a credit card, features 12 buttons. Students input their answers to multiple-choice questions posed through computer presentation software.

"There's probably about 12,000 clickers in circulation on campus right now," said Lesley Speller, a UA information technology research and support specialist for clickers. The university has a total of 26,237 students, according to a fall enrollment report.

About 170 faculty members and instructors now have clicker accounts, compared with only about 45 teacher accounts three years ago, Speller said, adding that the list "grows every semester."

"There is a bit of a learning curve, a rather steep learning curve," said Kathleen Morris, a mathematics instructor at UA, describing problems this fall after a "massive update" to the technology. But "they're very good to help students be engaged," she said, adding that she's using clickers more now in her teaching than she did three or four years ago.

Classroom clicker technology was first available commercially in the 1990s. The devices have been used since about 2001 at UA's Sam M. Walton College of Business. But at UA, until recently, multiple types of technology could be found on campus.

Some of that technology was homegrown. In 2001, UA physics professor Paul Thibado co-founded a company with Vince LaBella, at the time a UA postdoctoral student, to advance the technology by allowing for easy management of large numbers of student responses, Thibado said. He sold his stake in the company, Hyper-Interactive Teaching Technology, in 2006.

About three years ago, Provost Sharon Gaber called for a review of technology providers. After the review, Youngstown, Ohio-based Turning Technologies became UA's exclusive provider of clicker technology and software starting in the fall of 2011, Speller said.

Gaber described clickers as a teaching tool to reach a generation of students accustomed to using electronic devices.

"The question is, how do we continue to evolve our education and keep students engaged in class?" Gaber said. "In some ways, the clicker is an opportunity to do that."

This fall, more than 50 classes -- mostly the university's largest, which have hundreds of students -- utilized clickers, Speller said.

However, "we have not mandated it," Gaber said. The university has "no explicit goal at all" to make clicker use more widespread, she said.

Students paid $63 for each device and a one-time registration fee if they were buying a clicker for the first time this fall.

An update this fall known as TurningPoint Cloud required each student, even those who had purchased a clicker previously, to pay a registration fee of $36.77, after tax, according to the university bookstore.

While Turning Technologies offered a $25 rebate for the fee, some students expressed frustration about the cost.

"A lot of people thought it was ridiculous," said Cole Swenke, a junior.

Another student, Tanner Matone, said the rebate offer "was not communicated very clearly" at the university bookstore. The information about the rebate was also available on the university's website.

Dennis Brewer, UA's associate vice chancellor for information technology and chief information officer, said Turning Technologies provides software and hardware free of charge to be used by instructors.

The way Brewer sees it, "they make their money from the students, just like the textbook publishers do." A company representative did not respond to requests for comment.

Speller said each clicker purchased and registered can be used for the remainder of a student's academic career at UA, part of negotiations between the university and the company. "Originally, they were offering a semester for $25," Speller said.

However, "a lot of the students had trouble getting their accounts registered" this fall, Speller said. While she said the problems involved student errors, "Turning Technologies didn't make it as easy as it should" have been.

Instructors often tie a small percentage of a student's grade to attendance taken by clicker or through in-class quizzes. Matone said a friend of his decided to drop a class after missing out on some class credit because of not registering a device.

Faculty members said they appreciate the ability to engage with students.

Robert Brady, chairman of UA's Department of Communication, said he regularly creates in-class quizzes. The Turning Technology software links with PowerPoint, so instructors familiar with that presentation program can create multiple-choice questions, then have students submit their answers.

Presentations can vary, but a color-coded bar graph might show the percentage of students choosing a particular answer, with a green bar indicating the percentage of students answering correctly.

"That's the point of all of this, is to try to get people engaged. I think in that sense, it works," Brady said. "I am worried about, though, the academic honesty part of it. That's the greatest threat to the technology."

He spoke after recent faculty-member training held in UA's Faculty Technology Center. A trainer from Turning Technologies told the four faculty members in attendance about basic ways to use the program, as well as advanced features.

During the training, faculty members expressed concern about students using clickers that belong to other students. One instructor noted that he has more than 400 students, and it's impossible for him to police them all.

Claire Terhune, an assistant professor of anthropology, said she will probably use clickers when she teaches a class next semester with two sections of more than 200 students each.

As far as concerns about dishonesty, "I hope one of the major ways around that is to have a very detailed discussion with the students upfront on what is and isn't appropriate with the clickers," Terhune said.

The technology works best with large classes, she noted.

"There's no way to engage every single student, no matter how hard I try, without something like this," said Terhune, who has not used clickers at UA but did use Turning Technology clickers when she taught elsewhere. She said that while there is a learning curve, "they're really easy to use overall."

The TurningPoint Cloud system includes a smartphone app for students, but the university does not require instructors to allow the app.

Matone said none of his teachers allowed it, and one instructor cited concerns that it doesn't work properly. Gaber said some instructors may also not want phones to be used during class time.

"I want faculty to embrace technology where they're comfortable," Gaber said. "It has to work for them, and if it doesn't, it's not going to work for the students."

Despite complaining about the cost, mechanical engineering student Adam Yawn said he appreciated how the use of clickers lets an instructor quickly get students' opinions on a topic, especially in large classes.

He said he thought clickers helped him as a student.

Without them, "it's really easy to be passive in the class," Yawn said.

When asked to answer a question using the device, "you click in for credit," Yawn said. "It makes you actually consider the question. It makes you think about the problem more, because you're getting credit for it."

NW News on 12/15/2014

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