GOOGLE FORMS AND SMARTPHONES: EVALUATION OF AN ALTERNATIVE TO CLICKER SYSTEMS FOR COLLECTING FEEDBACK FROM STUDENTS

This paper presents findings from a pilot study that examined the use of the Google Forms service with a smartphone as a convenient and costless substitute for audience response systems (“clickers”), for instance to collect feedback from students during lectures in near real time. Clickers can be used as a form of technological support in large study groups for questioning or student polling, as well as in diverse teaching activities. The solution tested in our pilot study was a combination of (1) use of a smartphone device by students to complete an online feedback survey created by using the Google Forms service, (2) use of the online application Bitly to shorten the original URL of the Google Forms survey, and (3) students’ feedback to the lecturer during his/her teaching in near real-time by responding to the online survey items. The participants in our pilot-study were undergraduate and graduate students of a Central European university. To investigate the applicability of our alternative solution to using clickers, in designing scales in the evaluation survey of our technological solution (Google Forms + smartphones) the variables related to technology acceptance theories (TAM, exTAM) were used. The results of our study indicate that the use of the Google Forms service and students’ smartphones can be easily adopted by most college students as an effective and no-cost substitute for rather expensive clicker systems.

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