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Table of Contents of Teaching/Learning
Activities and Spaces
One of our Network
members, Purdue University, has recently adopted eInstruction's
Classroom Performance System for hundreds of classrooms across
the campus. Students buy inexpensive units from the bookstore,
register their names, and then use the units in any of the
equipped classrooms. This text is adapted from an October 19,
2004 Purdue press release:
Purdue students in large lecture classes use
response pads – or clickers – to answer questions and provide
other feedback.
Ed Evans, director for the Teaching & Learning
Technologies’ Learning Spaces area of Information Technology at
Purdue (ITaP), says a student’s clicker works much as a
television remote control. “Instead of raising their hands to
answer a question, students press a button to choose one of
several possible responses,” he says.
Just as it can be a bother to use separate
remote controls for the TV and DVD player at home, it’s
inconvenient for students to use separate clickers for different
classes. Large lecture classes with up to 450 students – in
communications, forestry, management and physics, to name a few
– have been experimenting with different types of audience
response pads in recent semesters. With response pad technology
on the rise in Purdue’s classrooms, some students were using one
remote control for one class and a different one for another
class.
In a move to keep classroom technology
convenient, affordable and reliable for students and faculty,
Purdue has become the first university in the country to
implement a system-wide license for using audience response pads
in the classroom.
With a system-wide license agreement in place
for a spring 2005 semester rollout, students can buy one clicker
that will work for any of their classes using RF response pad
technology. The clickers will cost about $12. As part of the
license agreement with Denton, Tex.-based
eInstruction Corporation,
students will not need to pay any other fees, such as activation
or subscription fees, related to using the clicker in any of
their classes.
Students like using response pad technology
because it helps faculty interact more closely with them and
customize their lectures based on students’ understanding in
real time. Erina MacGeorge, assistant professor for Purdue’s
Department of Communication, has used response pads in her
lecture class of about 90 students. “I found that it
significantly enhanced classroom participation, attentiveness
and good humor, and helped my students learn,” she says.
Tolga Akçura, assistant professor for the
Krannert School of Management, has used response pad technology
in an undergraduate marketing class at Purdue. “It increases the
overall pass rate and narrows the gap between the most
successful and least successful students,” he says.
Purdue plans to install the response pad
technology licensed from eInstruction in 315 classrooms on the
West Lafayette campus during the next semester. Darrell Ward,
president and CEO of eInstruction, says, “In classrooms across
the country, students are indicating that they are more likely
to come to class, pay attention in class and are empowered to
participate in class because of the student response units. They
indicate that their learning is enhanced due to these changes in
the basic classroom instructional paradigm.”
A groundswell of faculty interested in using
the response pad technology in large lecture classes, together
with a rising number of options available from publishers
bundling competing classroom response pad systems with their
books, led Purdue to investigate adopting a single type of
response pad system for use throughout the University.
ITaP collected faculty input from Purdue
campuses around the state, held a faculty forum and then
recommended adopting the new eInstruction RF response pad
technology. Previously, eInstruction’s infrared response pad
technology had been bundled with McGraw-Hill Education books
used at Purdue.
The adoption of one system not only allows
students’ response pads to be compatible among all their classes
at any campus, it also allows Purdue to install and support one
type of response pad technology in its classrooms, rather than
needing to install and support several different types. Using
only one type of response pad technology in the classroom also
prevents interference and improves reliability of the systems in
the classrooms.
CONTACT:
Ed Evans, director of Learning Spaces for
Teaching & Learning Technologies at Information Technology at
Purdue University, (765) 496-6496,
edevans@purdue.edu
Darrell Ward, president and CEO of
eInstruction,
darrel@einstruction.com
Erina MacGeorge, assistant professor in the
Department of Communication at Purdue University,
emacgeorge@purdue.edu
Tolga Akçura, assistant professor of
management, Krannert School of Management at Purdue University,
akcura@purdue.edu
-Steve Ehrmann, The TLT Group; updated November 6,
2004
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