Collaboration
Collaboration
Digital Polling
Digital polling software is a quick and easy way to engage and gather immediate feedback from cloud and campus-based students; and then you can choose how to present the feedback to your cohort.
It allows you to pose questions and record student responses that can then be presented back to the cohort in a synchronous manner. This can be used to get immediate feedback on where students are at, stimulate their reflections, and identify where support is required.
Why would I use Digital Polling?
Connected learning enables the co-construction of knowledge and helps shape facilitate a learner’s thinking through the connections they make real-time (Siemens, 2005). As educators we can motivate learners to fuse the gap between their experience and formal education, by connecting with others and encourage reflection to cultivate a productive learning community (Ito et al., 2013). This can be done by applying digital polling in your teaching.
Interviews with Deakin academics revealed a number of pedagogical reasons that motivated the use of digital polling in their teaching. Digital polling has been found to engage students through considered questions; reinforce threshold learning concepts; and foster a shared learning experience and conversation between students and teachers (Hoekstra and Mollborn, 2012).
The design of digital polling questions is critical to maximise engagement and challenge students. If the questions are constructed correctly then, digital polling can be used to create a learning dialogue between the students and the teacher.
When would I use Digital Polling?
The following faculty use cases outline when you might use digital polling in your teaching, what benefits come of using this technology, what challenges you might face and the strategies you can use to navigate these challenges.
An academic from the Faculty of Arts and Education used digital polling to create a sense of cohort. In a large lecture, the sense of cohort can be lost and digital polling can help facilitate more active participation. To enhance a sense of cohort between on-campus and cloud students, digital polling was used by this academic.
Digital polling was found to be beneficial to their teaching practice as it provided insights into the student’s thought process and enabled more immediate feedback loops from students. Student responses informed his ability to adapt the content and enabled him to reflect on his teaching approach. In doing so, he was able to use this feedback to iterate the interactivity in the future.
Top tip: Enable responses to be ‘anonymous’ to generate a more active discussion from students.
In the Faculty of Health, an academic used digital polling in a first-year unit with 700 students. Previously, he had organised activities mid-way through the lecture for students to engage and check their understanding of the threshold concepts, but he found students rushed through these activities.
He noted that the ‘free text’ option was a useful way to generate discussion, however, it was challenging as it required him to think on his feet and respond to students. Regardless, they continued to use this question type and he has been able to address common misunderstandings and clarify concepts based on their responses.
Through actively using the software, he found multiple uses for digital polling including exam question revision where he responded to students in real time. He found students really engaged in this process and were more interested to discuss both correct and incorrect responses and the logic behind them.
Top Tip: Questions need to be constructively aligned to the content and be fit for purpose. Digital polling is much more than structuring multiple choice questions so be sure to use a variety of questions to engage learners.
In this scenario, an academic from the Faculty of Business and Law used digital polling in a first-year unit with 1600 students to enhance student engagement and to seek feedback on the level of course content difficulty. Digital polling enabled him to seek feedback from students and make informed decisions about what was essential to include in future iterations.
By using digital polling, he was able to get a sense of his cohort and consequently design questions for impact. That is, it is essential that students see how you have used the responses, whether that be to support learners, or discuss key concepts based on their feedback – namely making the feedback loop explicit. As students realise their ability to influence teaching, this can encourage them to more actively engage with digital polling.
Getting started with generating questions aligned to course content was time consuming. To overcome this challenge the academic posed questions from the textbook and iterated these over time.
The academic didn’t think much of digital polling at first, but has since changed his mind after student feedback and eValuate results favourably reflected their use of digital polling in classroom.
Top Tip: The reasons why you are using digital polling in teaching and the benefits from student perspectives are important factors to consider. Be sure to demonstrate this by showing the impact of their responses in real time and tailor your approach.
How do I get started with Mentimeter?
Mentimeter is both a digital polling and a presentation tool that can be used for both purposes. Find detailed pedagogical and technical guides on our digital polling resources pages by clicking the icons below.
Hoekstra, A., & Mollborn, S. (2011). How clicker use facilitates existing pedagogical practices in higher education: data from interdisciplinary research on student response systems, Learning, Media And Technology, 37:3, 303-320.
Ito, M., Gutiérrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J., Salen, K., … & Watkins, S. (2013). Connected learning: an agenda for research and design, The Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, Irvine, CA, 1-99
Laurillard, D. (2002). Rethinking University Teaching: A Conversational Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies, Routledge, London, pp. 1-284
Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology & Distance Learning, 2:1, 3-10.