A future direction for clickers?

Clickers are routinely used to survey class on their understanding of topics or test their knowledge with quizzes, and as technology has developed, there have been clever ways of doing this (See: The Rise and Rise…). One issue that arises is that as lecturers, we don’t have a convenient way to know what individual students think, or what their answer is.

glassesEnter this recent paper from BJET, An Augmented Lecture Feedback System to support Learner and Teacher Communication. This paper describes a clicker-based system, but instead of (or as well as) a lecturer viewing a chart of responses, the lecturer sees the response hover over the student’s head. I know it’s early in the year, so I will let you read that sentence again.

The system works by way of the lecturer wearing glasses that scan the room and when each response is entered. The technology (while very clever) is still very rudimentary, and no-one in their right mind would want to look like this in their classroom, but as Google Glasses or equivalent take off, who knows what possibilities there will be in the coming decade.

I think it’s an interesting paper for showing a different aspect of lecturer-student interaction in the class. Quite what you do when you see that some students are incorrect is up to individual teaching scenarios.

The authors have a video explaining the paper in more detail, shown below.

2 thoughts on “A future direction for clickers?

    1. Hi
      Yes, I came across Plickers just last month, and it looks like a very nice idea. Hoping to try it out myself in next semester.

      Thanks,
      Michael

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