Audience Response

Audience response systems are not new. They were first introduced in the 1960s but became more popular and accessible with the "Clicker". Modern audience response systems like "Tophat" use the student's smart device to provide responses to instructor developed questions.

Incorporating audience response systems into a classroom lecture is supposed to increase engagement and wake the student up from being a passive listener. In many cases the audience response systems require specialized hardware (the clicker remote) or a subscription to a service. In both of these cases the students are charged a fee, which with the already high costs associated with getting a degree, seems unreasonable. Therefore, the added cost for the student, in my opinion, outweighed the assumed benefits of using an audience response system.

A while ago IUPUI (as part of IU) obtained an enterprise license agreement with Top Hat which allows all students to use Top Hat without a fee. Without a fee being added on to the students I was willing to implement an audience response system in my classes. After multiple semesters of using Top Hat, here are some suggestions.

• Top Hat has the capability of open response (fully written responses) from the students. It also has the capability to have anonymous submissions. Do not have both of these options on at the same time. This will lead to at least one student (in a class of 100 or more) responding with something designed to get a laugh. When it happens once, it will happen again and again. The easiest thing to do is to make the submissions not anonymous and inform the students on the first day that everything they do with Top Hat will be logged for the remainder of the class. Once this was implemented, class-clown type submissions never occurred again.
• Anonymous submissions work well for limited responses, like true/false or multiple choice, but these are only useful for simple questions like "do you understand XYZ" There really is no reason to use anonymous submissions unless you think the student would be embarrassed to give a real answer
• Having points associated with each of the questions helps with participation and encourages the students to take the questions seriously
• The response from the student should have some impact on the course, otherwise it just becomes an easy way to give a quiz.
• Using a quick question immediately after lecturing on a topic is an easy way to determine if the students really understand the material, however, if they didn't understand the material and you have points associated with the question, you should give an opportunity to answer the same question (or similar) to gain back the points
• It is best to assign a time for each question, otherwise the Top Hat questions can take a lot of time, but be prepared to add time as needed. Top Hat provides the number of responses, so if a large number of students have submitted answers, it is easy to just click the +15 seconds button.
• Take the time to upload PowerPoint slides to the Top Hat site and run your lecture from the Top Hat site. This allows seamless integration of the Top Hat questions with the lecture. This helps prevent having to switch from one application and back in the middle of the lecture (which sounds easy, but in full screen mode with multiple other windows becomes difficult)
• Students have lives, and may miss class for one reason or another. (Sports, hospital stay, etc.) If you are assigning points for the Top Hat questions you have to have a way to account for excused absences.