A 2021 Lilly Conference online presentation entitled “The Benefits of Using an Audience Response System in Class” caught my attention tonight. Frank Spors from the Western University of Health Sciences spoke about the optometry program there. At Western U, they have a four-year doctoral optometry program with class size between 75-90 and lectures for all students and four lab sections, explained Spors. They also switched to remote Zoom sessions in March 2020. The labs were smaller and virtual. Spors explained the importance of interactive lectures that include student-to-student and student-to-instructor engagement. Spors asked: how can we better engage students? Spors then describe technologies, focusing on audience response systems (ARS, or clickers). ARS, according to Spors, can be “used to assess: factual recall, conceptual understanding, and knowledge application” and can be used to enhance small group discussions and peer instructions.
Spors mentioned that most of the questions they use are implemented as small group questions (5-6 per session). The co-presenter, Dr. Joseph Gray, showed the TopHat system they use for this course. I have been using TopHat for several years and love the user-friendly interface… though I struggle with giving students multiple attempts and recording the last one or highest grade, for example. Also, students mention that it is another tool they have to get used to and access in addition to Moodle. Spors and Gray then described the purpose of their study to examine the student experience with Top Hat. Dr. Dorcas Tsang then described the participants in the study. Students had 2-3 minutes to discuss possible solutions with their neighbors, come to a conclusion, and individually submit answers. Most of these questions focused on lecture concepts. Tsang also mentioned they used an anonymous survey at the conclusion of the course to gather student data. Most students reported preferring the ARS and that it helped maintain attention. Students reported wanting ARS questions most lectures, and the majority wanted at least 6 questions. They compared the class with the ARS to the class without an ARS and concluded that students believed the ARS helped them in attention and effective learning of the material. Tsang also noted that students seemed to prefer multiple choice questions. Spors spoke about what they learned with this study and the importance of leveraging peers for collaboration. Spors gave an overview of their TopHat course. This was super useful since we were able to see their structure and organization. They have folders for lecture materials with TopHat questions, practice questions, downloads folder… They also use a consistent tagging system for questions (“Q1: Data of the patient’s glasses are found during hand…”). I also noticed the example questions Spors showed had 0.5 participation and 0.5 correctness weights. Spors provided a superb overview of the features of TopHat and how questions are presented to students, with the opportunity for re-poling. I enjoyed the demonstration: it was a quick refresher and helped me learn how others structure their TopHat course sites. I was thinking today that I look forward to in-person polling again and now have some ideas for how to reorganize our TopHat materials.
