Student Response System (Clicker) Trial

Clicker is the colloquial name for audience response or voting systems.

Different vendors give them different names (i.e., Classroom Voting Systems, Audience Response Systems, Student Response Systems , Classroom Performance Systems) but they are all basically the same. They allow each individual students in a lecture to provide immediate feedback to the lecturer, via prepared multi-choice and True/False questions (typically in PowerPoint).

The student units are wireless, and the systems we will be considering, operate using radio frequencies (as opposed to Infrared, which requires direct line of sight).

They can be useful in assessing student comprehension of subject matter and are of particular use in large lecture theatres or with difficult concepts. They can also be used to conduct surveys. In most systems the results can be imported directly into an Excel spreadsheet.

Generally the results are anonymous, but if units are used exclusively by individual students, then the tracking of results, or grading of individual answers is possible.

They are being used internationally by numerous universities and there is increasing interest in their use at Monash. There has already been one small implementation with two other trials pending.