The popularity of clickers at UCL is both satisfying and rewarding. While they are known by many monikers (EVS, PRS, voting handsets, response systems, doofers or ‘those Who Wants to be a Millionaire things’ the term clickers will be used here. When used in education, clickers are shown to have many positive benefits for learners and teachers. A 
previous 
analysis 
(Roschelle, 
Penuel 
and 
Abrahamson,
 2004) highlighted
 commonalities 
and 
trends 
in 
26 
multi‐subject 
educational 
clicker 
studies. Clickers
 are 
noted 
to, 
with 
frequency 
in parenthesis; 
increase 
interaction 
(6), 
enhance
 the 
lecture 
experience 
(5), 
increase understanding 
(5),
 increase
 engagement 
(4), 
allow 
students 
to 
gauge 
their 
understanding
 (4), 
allow 
teachers 
to 
gauge 
their 
understanding (3) 
and
 increase
 communication 
(2).

While these data are somewhat crude, it but a brief segmented analysis of a rather large field. Clickers are cited as enhancing the experience of attending what is still seemingly a compulsory and largely passively didactic form of large group education – the lecture. Additionally it is  important to remember that clickers continually prove themselves to be ‘low threshold technology’ (easy to start using) but with a  caveat that the technology might be easy, but it’s the transformational teaching part that gets people the most.

Increased student interaction

How would you react if 300 students just simultaneously indicated that they don’t understand a key concept live in a lecture. Would you just move on? Instead, perhaps circle back for a while and go over the content some more or load Moodle with some additional resources? These are all good counter-moves and can grow into some wild new pedagogical developments (such as Peer Instruction or Agile/contingent teaching [see footnotes for more info]). From a student’s perspective, they can use clickers to instantly compare their ‘perceived knowledge’ against that of their peers, and the teacher at the front. Anonymity helps keep people voting, perhaps through difficult or sensitive questions and the participation and thinking/cognitive exercise helps to ensure students are more alert as they interact through the session. Or, as one student put it; “how nice to be actually asked to think in a lecture” (Draper and Brown, 2004).

So, they seem to work – that’s a good thing. At UCL we (E-Learning Environments – the central e-learning team) really think they work, so much so that we have been investing in the clickers year-on-year since we adopted them in 2008. We now seem them increasingly embedded in many areas of UCL life from the Medical and Physical Sciences through to Engineering and Economics. We see evidence to suggest they can work anywhere, in any group size (nearly) and would really like to see more growth in other areas such as Arts and Humanities, for example.

Further investment

The typical route to starting with the voting is to contact E-Learning Environments; we can get you started with a demo and a chat about how they can be used. If you know PowerPoint you’re about 60-80% of the way there already. Once you’re confident, you can book a set for a session and we’ll come along too if you like. In addition, for those who want more, for the last few years we have been putting batches directly within departments to cut down on the loaning mechanisms and increase their use and spread within areas of UCL. For the MBBS we have even put them directly with students for 10 months.

Loaning logistics

We’re not going to hide from the fact that picking up, handing out, using, getting back and dropping off potentially hundreds of handsets is a tedious task. It takes a bit of time and muscle to hurl these things around and this has been identified as a blocker for many. This is understandable, so we’re addressing the issue head-on.

Next step – right into the room

Teaching hardware

A project for 2011/12 was to install the voting hardware (a little USB dongle) into every centrally-bookable lecture theatre. This has largely enjoyed much success, with most of the rooms now fitted with the required hardware on the lectern PC. Those who want to use their own laptop just bring their own USB dongle too – but many are using the room’s IT and so it should be enabled for voting automatically. We are not quite finished yet, so do contact us if you’re allocated a room for teaching and want to use the voting for the first time.  We hope in the future all rooms will be ‘voting enabled’ or perhaps even a change in room booking to ensure the correct technology is given to those who request it…

Student hardware

For now we have our sights in permanent installs for student (voting) hardware in two of UCL’s largest teaching spaces. Borrowing 20 handsets for a session is manageable but 300+ is not. Two rooms have been lined up for a permanent install; Cruciform Lecture Theatre 1 and Chemistry Auditorium. A suitable ‘cage’ has been sourced from a supplier which is affixed to the desk and the clicker/voting handset sits within. This is in alignment with users of these rooms being strong clicker users, and us wanting to minimise on the unnecessary logistical operations, to allow more concentration on the teaching and learning and, we hope, increased use of the technology.

Coming soon

With funding being made available from August 1st, we hope to commence the work over the summer, or in early Term 1 of the 2012/13 academic year.

The future is mobile

…Apparently. We are also looking into using mobile and smart, browser-enabled devices for voting. While uptake and ownership is actually quite low at UCL, we also don’t currently demand students bring their own device (AKA BYOD) for teaching and learning activities. This may change in the future, perhaps when every pocket has a connected browser, but for now, this technology is sitting in the right place for expansion, hence our rationale for growth in this service.

If you have any comment on any of the points raised please do post on here, email ELE (ele@ucl.ac.uk) or visit the e-learning website.

Footnotes

Peer Instruction (Mazur, 1997) is a form of teaching devised at Harvard by Eric Mazur. He uses clickers to poll the audience on a topic or concept, they vote and then form small-group discussions. They are encouraged to convince someone who voted for a different answer to change their mind, by explaining how they derived at their answer. The correct answer is not given until the second poll, which usually shows a shift towards the correct answer (by student discussion). Finally, Mazur, the instructor, then explains why that answer is correct.

Contingent teaching (Beatty et al, 2006; Draper and Brown 2004) is a slightly more abstract form of teaching whereby there is no set, linear path through the lecture materials. Instead more direction is given from the students, who vote on questions, the results of which are used as indicators for the teacher to move in different directions.

Both forms can even happen ‘by mistake’ when clickers are used, as the reaction of the lecturer is based on the voting results and/or how they want to increase interactivity with the inclusion of the voting results.

References

Draper
 S. 
W. 
and 
Brown 
M. 
I., 
(2004). 
Increased interactivity 
in 
lectures 
using 
an 
electronic 
voting 
system,
 Journal of Computter 
Assististed 
Learning, 
20,
 p81–94.

Mazur, E. (1997). Peer Instruction, A User’s Manual. Upper Saddle River, NJ. Pretence-Hill.

Roschelle, 
J., 
Abrahamson, 
L. 
A. 
and 
Penuel, 
W. 
R. 
(2004). 
DRAFT 
Integrating
 Classroom 
Network 
Technology
and 
Learning 
Theory to
 Improve
 Classroom 
Science
 Learning:
 A 
Literature 
Synthesis. 
Paper 
presented
 at 
the
Annual 
Meeting 
of 
the 
American 
Educational
 Research
Association,
 San
 Diego, 
CA.

As UCL’s project The Digital Department evolves, we are beginning to think about not only the digital literacies required by our teaching administrators (TAs) but what digital abilities are now required by all staff to enable the technological change agenda of the institution.

We have already revealed the 40+ applications that UCL administrators use in our The Digital Department – Workshop at 2012 AUA Conference and we are actively considering how skills could be developed.

I have been wondering though what a specific teaching and learning list might look like, and some kind soul has recently had a go with The 33 Digital Skills Every 21st Century Teacher should Have.

So what are they?

1- Create and edit  digital audio
2- Use Social bookmarking to share resources with and between learners
3- Use blogs and wikis to create online platforms for students
4- Exploit digital images for classroom use
5- Use video content to engage students
6- Use infographics to visually stimulate students
7- Use social networking sites to connect with colleagues and grow professionally
8- Create and deliver asynchronous presentations and training sessions
9- Compile a digital e-portfolio for their own development
10- Have a knowledge about online security
11- be able to detect plagiarized works in students assignments
12- Create screen capture videos and tutorials
13- Curate web content for classroom learning
14- Use and provide students with task management tools to organize their work and plan their learning
15- Use polling software to create a real-time survey in class
16- Understand issues related to copyright and fair use of online materials
17- Exploit  computer games for pedagogical purposes
18- Use digital assessment tools to create quizzes
19- Use of collaborative tools for text construction and editing
20- Find and evaluate authentic web based content
21- Use of mobile devices like tablets
22- Identify online resources that are safe for students browsing
23- Use digital tools for time management purposes
24- Learn about the different ways to use YouTube in your classroom
25- Use note taking tools to share interesting content with your students
26- Annotate web pages and highlight parts of text to share with your class
27- Use of online graphic organizers and printables
28- Use of online sticky notes to capture interesting ideas
29- Use of screen casting tools to create and share tutorials
30- Exploit group text messaging tools for collaborative project work
31- Conduct an effective search query with the minimum time possible
32- Conduct a research paper using digital tools
33- Use file sharing tools to share docs and files with students online

The original blog post explains each category and links to resources. You could argue with some and a few might be less important in HE,  but most look sensible. We could also add a few UCL-specific ones  such as Moodle tools, Turnitin, Lecturecast, MyPortfolio etc.

Like the TAs list is unlikely that any individual would  – or indeed would want to – use all 33, but both lists together taken point to a rather formidable need for personal and/or institutional development.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gorbould/3949071167/

Pedagogical soup remix

Donald Clark, former CEO of Epic Group Plc, a leading company in the e-learning market now blogs, tweets and the first time I met him stood up for an hour about why noone should lecture him. Over the past few months he posted 52 blog posts on influential people in the world of learning theory. This post is the short, crude, not-enough version, the soup mix of his hard efforts. Why post it? Because E-Learning Environments read, talk, enact and remix this stuff all day long, or at least try to. By posting it, it enables us to get hit right in the brain and gives us a chance to try and pass it on, even if it’s just a little, to you.

Ingredients

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Jesus, Mohammed, Ignatius, Calvin, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, James, Dewey, Marx, Gramsci, Althusser, Habermas, Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner, Pavlov, Thorndike, Skinner, Bandura, Freud, Erikson, Rogers, Montessori, Steiner, Freire, Illich, White, Black & Wiliam, Ebbinghaus, Miller, Atkinson & Shiffrin, Baddeley, Tulving, Kandel, Mager, Gagne, Kolb, Bloom, Maslow, Seligman, Bandle, Fleming, Honey & Mumford, Eysenck, Gardner & a dash of Kirkpatrick

Recipe

Take them all, try not to think too hard and make your own mind up.

There’s so much, I picked one quote from each article, if you want more it’s all Donald’s work, he deserves the praise, critisism and enjoyment in full, links are all his work, this post is mearly an index.

Socrates
“the teacher should be an intellectual midwife to people’s own thoughts is his great educational principle”

Plato
3 Rs – “The educational system should also be designed to determine the abilities of individuals and training provided to apply to the strengths of their abilities”

Aristotle
“As a proponent of the Greek ideal of an all-round education he recommended a balance of activities that train both mind and body, including debate, music, science and philosophy, combined with physical development and training.”

Confucius
“He did not admire a totally passive form of learning and encouraged students to be active learners but did see respect for teachers as important, along with manners and decorum.”

Jesus
“Given the hold religion had on educational institutions until relatively recently, especially Universities, it is hardly surprising that the sermon transmogrified into the ‘lecture’, which to this day, remains the main pedagogic technique in Higher education.”

Mohammed
“Koran means ‘to recite’ and the text was originally meant to be read aloud. It has been argued that this has led to a dependence on rote learning.”

Ignatius
“The curriculum, however, aimed to ‘form’ and not just ‘inform’ character through analysis”

Calvin
“the traits of the preacher were to become that of the teacher”

Locke
“recommends educational methods that focus on example and practice, rather than the teaching of information and principles”

Rousseau
“It is the learner that matters and the learner who develops in a natural fashion, not shaped by teachers but growing in response to opportunities for development”

Wollstonecraft
“she is firmly against single-sex schools. It is important that both girls and boys learn from and about each other for a harmonious society”

James
“The learner must listen, but then take notes, experiment, write essays, measure, consult and apply”

Dewey
“he was keen to break down the boundaries of school, seeing them as a community within a community or an ‘embryonic society’”

Marx
“Marx believed that our very consciousness, as well as our theorising and institutions, were the result of basic economic structures, education is seen as the result of existing class structures”

Gramsci
“opened the door for a more enlightened view of education and change, counter to the brutality of anti-intellectualism of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.”

Althusser
“Althusser saw education as the means by which the class system perpetuates itself, stratifying people into workers, the petty bourgeoisie and capitalists”

Habermas
“Education, for Habermas should not simply fill up the recipients with the current canon but promote participation”

Piaget
“What’s worrying is the fact that this Piagean view of child development, based on ‘ages and stages’ is still widely believed, despite being quite wrong”

Vygotsky
“the strength of Vygotsky’s learning theory stands or falls on his social constructivism, the idea that learning is fundamentally a socially mediated and constructed activity”

Bruner
“He thought that different processes were used by learners in problem solving and that these vary from person to person and that social interaction lay at the root of good learning.”

Pavlov
“physiological response to external stimuli (Conditioned reflexes) was to shape the study of learning for most of the early and middle 20th century”

Thorndike
“focus on rewards, punishment and repeated practice was to dominate behaviourist psychology, and research into learning, for decades”

Skinner
“Learning, for Skinner was the ability of an organism to learn to operate in its environment (operant conditioning)”

Bandura
“Bandura has often been seen as a bridge between behaviourism and cognitive psychology as he moves us beyond classical and operant conditioning, claiming that we also learn by observation”

Freud
“The main aim of all education is to teach the child to control its instincts.”

Erikson
“He expanded Freud’s childhood developmental theory, well beyond the first few years of life, into a lifelong development theory of identity, with an emphasis on the adolescent ‘identity crisis’ and the role of the ego”

Rogers
“Influenced by Dewey, he emphasised the relationship between learner and facilitator”

Montessori
“she sees the need to let children develop naturally with a strong emphasis on individualised learning. This is based on her belief that a child learns best when left to make their own choices within given constraints.”

Stiener
“Education, for Steiner, is not so much teaching, or even learning, as a process of spiritual development defined within Steiner’s ‘Anthroposophy'”

Freire
“Education, for Freire, is not separate from politics and like many social educational theorists he takes the Marxist position that there is no neutral position on either knowledge or education, everything has a social context”

Illich
“Most people acquire most of their knowledge outside of school. Most learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction. Most learning is, in fact, a by-product of some other activity defined as work or leisure.”

White
“White uses a concept that combines the needs of learner but also links directly to the needs of a democratic society. That concept is autonomy.”

Black and Wiliam
“The classroom is the ‘black box’ and they attempt to change teaching with clear advice on ‘formative assessment’. This is the powerful lever, they claim, that unlocks potential through good teaching.”

Ebbinghaus
“The distinction between short and long-term memory was made, and it became clear that successful learning had to push knowledge from short to long-term memory ”

Miller
“‘The magic number 7 plus and minus 2’ (1956) which focused attention (literally) on a problem that plagues teaching and learning, the danger of ‘cognitive overload’”

Atkinson and Shiffrin
“Memory is a necessary condition for learning, yet not enough teachers, lecturers and instructors know even the basic psychology of memory”

Baddeley
“Baddeley looked specifically at ‘encoding’. to unpack what he called ‘working memory’ to replace the previous, simpler ‘short-term’ memory model”

Tulving
“ncoding is perhaps the one area of memory theory that has the most direct impact on learning, as understanding encoding can led to both better teaching and better learning. ”

Kandel
“Learning, for Kandel, is the ability to acquire new ideas from experience and retain them as memories (a simple fact often overlooked)”

Mager
“His aim was to produce a more rigorous and precise approach to the design of learning experiences based on competences and assessment that relate to defined learning or performance objectives.”

Gagne
“he developed his five categories of learning and a universal method for instruction defined in his nine instructional steps.”

Kolb
“We may, for example, be able to do something but not express it in abstract terms. In the end, however, learning is formed through real experience, where one’s ideas are put to the test. Feedback then shapes the learning so that performance improves.”

Bloom
“known for his hugely influential classification of learning behaviours and provided concrete measures for identifying different levels of learning”

Maslow
“he stripped learning and training back to a hierarchy of basic human needs and desires, in an attempt to understand what motivates people to learn.”

Seligman
“The well-being of the person and learner has been brought into the equation, with sensitivity around positive traits and the teaching of social and emotional skills beyond the academic curriculum”

Bandler
“It would seem that the training world is sometimes happy buying and selling cleverly marketed classroom ‘performance’ products that are, in fact, pseudoscience.”

Fleming
“Despite reports funded but Government, academic institutions and professional psychologists, decrying learning styles theory, and VAK in particular, it persists across the learning world, promulgated by poor teacher training and ‘train the trainer’ courses”

Honey and Mumford
“The learner is asked to complete an expensive, copyrighted questionnaire that diagnoses their learning style by asking what the learner does in the real workplace. Their learning style is then used to identify weaknesses that need building”

Eysenck
“he put forward the proposition that intelligence had a hereditary component and was not wholly, socially determined”

Gardner
“Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is opposed to the idea of intelligence being a single measurable attribute. His is a direct attack on the practice of psychometric tests and behaviourism, relying more on genetic, instinctual and evolutionary arguments to build a picture of the mind”

Kirkpatrick
“he proposed a standard approach to the evaluation of training that became a de facto standard”

—

End note

Since reading Donald’s epic blogging I’ve wanted to comment on his findings, but sadly this is all that’s come of it for public dissemination. His work is only poorly quoted here, he deserves all the respect, thanks and credit for the above. If anything, it’s butchery. But if you’re here, reading, then maybe it’s not all so bad after all.

Plenty of fodder to work with in there; much more out there…

 

As part of UCL’s involvement in the Cheltenham Science Festival, someone from our team goes down to Cheltenham to support the use of electronic voting in some of the events there. My colleague Matt has already blogged about the kinds of things we do.

This year, one of the groups we are supporting is the Festival of the Spoken Nerd – Helen, Matt and Steve – who are doing a show in Cheltenham on Thursday 14 June.

Last night they did a try out of some of their material in the upstairs room at the Green Man in London. They certainly had a packed house, although seating only about 30 at a squeeze the venue is very cosy and the audience certainly get to interact with the performers.

Part of the performance was a re-make of Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game, with a teams loosely led by each of the performers and a series of science and maths questions to answer. The voting handsets led each member of the audience have their say, with a number of trick questions to add to the fun.

So far, so fairly ordinary in the world of voting. But what made it more interesting was another part of the performance where teams used their mobiles to play pong against each other using crowd-sourcing to aggregate the individual commands to move the bat up or down.

We started talking about how the voting handsets might be used within this. TurningPoint do provide an SDK, and with this it should be possible to use the handsets as controllers for pretty much any application. It turns out that a colleague, Daniel Richardson, has already done this, using voting handsets to control a crowd tightrope walking game.

So, what else could we do with the handsets. Well, lots. For Economics, how about a simulation where different teams play the Treasury, Bank of England, Banks etc in a simulation of the economy. Controlling machinery in Engineering. Determining the functioning of the human body in medicine.

We could take it further. Rather than having each handset being an equal partner in the crowd-sourcing efforts, we could plant catalysts or decoys to simulate real world phsychology or group behaviour, or disease or system failure.

There is lots of potential here to go beyond simple multiple choice questions to involve the audience in dymamic live simulations, games and experiments. I’m quickly discovering that there’s much more to these simple handsets than I ever realised.

We’ve been re-structured!

More than a year in gestation, the ‘Smart IT‘ reorganisation in UCL’s Information Services Division has finally transformed the old LTSS (Learning Technology Support Service) into shiny new E-Learning Environments, aka ELE – (and yes we’re planning lots of cheesy ‘ELEphant in the room’/’ELEphant that’s scared of mice’ jokes and cute logos).

What does it really mean?

Well we are very pleased to be expanding from 8 staff to 15. This means that in addition to the core services that we’ve long been associated with we will be able to work more closely with departments and individuals, we’ll be doing more ‘horizon scanning’ and evaluation work, and will be running trials of new technologies and educational approaches. We will also be working with colleagues in UCL Estates to develop UCL’s physical learning spaces (hence the ‘environments’ part of our name).

ELE has three new sub-teams:

• E-Learning Services, led by Jason Norton, managing our core services, end-user support and the central training programme.
• E-Learning Advisory, led by Clive Young, supporting and disseminating good practice through school-facing facilitators who work closely with CALT colleagues, running local events and staff development activities. The team includes a distance learning facilitator.
• E-Learning Developments, led by Steve Rowett, horizon scanning and evaluating new technologies and pedagogies, running and evaluating trials. The team includes a learning spaces specialist and an evaluation specialist.

If you want to contact anyone in the group email ele@ucl.ac.uk or call x 40820.

A very interesting Echo360 ‘community conference’ was held at UCL yesterday. There was a strong UCL presence  including ViTAL webinar star Carl Gombrich, talking about flipping.

Echo360 outlined their technical roadmap, including better editing and social learning features, quizzes and so on. All very exciting but some saw a potential overlap/confusion with the VLE.

I also did a presentation on behalf of the ViTAL/REC:all projects reviewing how our pedagogical ideas of using video had developed over the years and gave a snapshot of how far we had got with the REC:all project.

The slides are below.