YACRS, A New open-source classroom response system [980] Home : Annual Conference 2015

Public Group active 1 year, 11 months ago

Tue, Sep 8 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Authors: Niall Barr, and Quintin Cutts
Room: Room 2.218 (First Floor)
Theme: Open educational practice
Type: Standard Presentation

Description

For several years voting systems have been used as a way to increase student involvement during lectures, and to support teaching techniques such as the flip classroom, made popular by Eric Mazur (Mazur 1996). Typically these voting systems have used system specific handsets for the student input, with the responses appearing on the computer lecturers using for the presentation. At the University of Glasgow although there has been a considerable investment in these voting systems, uptake has been limited due to the logistics of distributing the handsets to students, and ensuring that the handsets have batteries replaced when necessary. For some time it has been clear that the student handsets are rapidly becoming obsolete, as most students are turning up to lecturers with at least one Internet connected device, which is more than capable of replacing the handset. The 2013 survey first-year students at the University found that 90% reported that they had a smartphone and 97.4% reported they had a laptop computer (Honeychurch & McCluckie 2014). In this presentation, I will introduce a new open source classroom response system, YACRS (Yet Another Classroom Response System), developed at the University of Glasgow to replace the existing clicker systems. I will also compare it with some commercial alternatives such as Poll Everywhere and Socrative.

One of the key factors in making a classroom response system successful is that it must take as little effort as possible from the lecturer, so that it does not interfere with their presentation (Nielsen et al. 2013). For this reason, YACRS has been designed to be extremely easy for lecturers to integrate into their teaching. The lecturer controls the application from a small control panel which can float on top of presentation software such as PowerPoint or Keynote, and when the lecturer initiates a question by pressing the start button, a screenshot of the current desktop of the presentation computer is stored along with student responses. There are versions of the teacher control software for both Windows and Macintosh computers. The main application, with which which students interact using their mobile phones, tablet computers are laptops, is a simple LAMP stack web application. There is no need for students to install any software on their devices, as all interactions through a web browser. There is also a facility for students who do not have a suitable Internet connected device to vote using SMS messages from a more basic phone.

YACRS was introduced at the University of Glasgow in September 2014, initially with two first year computing science classes with a total of approximately 170 students. The initial pilot introduction was extremely successful, and the software is now in use with a wide range of courses. While the key purpose of YACRS was to replace the classroom response clicker systems, which were mostly limited to multiple-choice interactions, the use of students Internet devices allows a greater range of interactions to be possible. YACRS also allows text response questions, and can also support multiple questions being active at the same time, which can be useful as a means running quick class tests or collecting student feedback responses.

Honeychurch, S. & McCluckie, B., 2014. First Year Student Use of Technology and their Expectations of Technology Use in their Courses. Available at: http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_334936_en.pdf.

Mazur, E., 1996. Peer instruction: A User’s Manual, Addison-Wesley.

Nielsen, K.L., Hansen, G. & Stav, J.B., 2013. Teaching with student response systems (SRS): teacher-centric aspects that can negatively affect students’ experience of using SRS. Research in Learning Technology, 21(0).

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