Inside Out: Bridging the gap between what students think and what they say

Knowing what students are thinking as opposed to what they are saying, as humorously portrayed in the film Inside Out, and adjusting the delivery of a lecture based on this, has the opportunity to make lectures more relevant and to increase engagement with students.  Although mind reading is not yet available, it is now possible to know to some degree what students are thinking by harnessing the power of the mobile devices students carry with them and making good use of the now ubiquitous university WiFi service to provide real-time anonymous controlled interaction between the students and the lecturer.   This use of Bring Your Own Devices in education has many potential benefits, as enumerated by Bruff (2015), and evaluated by Good (2013) and Haintz, Pichler and Ebner (2013) There are many BYOD audience response systems available (e.g NearPod, TurningPoint, Optivote, PowerVote, StuIntDev), all with different features and limitations, and even the simplest have the facility to poll students and get textual feedback, which is all that is needed in order to increase engagement.  Anonymous audience response systems can encourage students to volunteer information in response to questions posed by the lecturer, with their responses displayed on the screen for comment and discussion, leading to a dynamic learning environment. Questions can be pre-set, or created on the fly in response to feedback from the audience.  Simple questions with a text-based response, as well as those with multiple choice selection, can be very effective. Examples will be given from the experience of the use of the free version of NearPod and the in-house StuIntDev in the department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Greenwich.  The audience will be encouraged to use their own BYOD to participate in the same way as students do during a lecture.  Some of the pitfalls of this approach will be experienced and discussed, with suggested strategies for dealing with them.  The audience will be given the opportunity to discuss how best to utilise this technology in the lecture theatre. References Bruff, D. (2015), “Classroom Response Systems (‘Clickers’)”, available online from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/clickers/#questions (Accessed 5 February 2016) Good, K.C., 2013. “Audience Response Systems in higher education courses: A critical review of the literature”, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning , 10 (5), pp.19-34, available online from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/May_13/May_13.pdf#page=23 (Accessed 6 February 2016) Haintz, C., Pichler, K. and Ebner, M. (2014) “Developing a Web-Based Question-Driven Audience Response System Supporting BYOD”, Journal of Universal Computer Science , vol. 20, no. 1 pp. 39-56, available online at http://www.jucs.org/jucs_20_1/developing_a_web_based/jucs_20_01_0039_0056_haintz.pdf (Accessed 6 March 2016)