Abstract
This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Technologies such as audience response units ('clickers') have been used to facilitate greater student engagement within a variety of educational settings, but numerous technical issues have limited their more widespread use. More recently, flexible, cloud-based student response systems (SRSs), which are designed for use with student mobile devices and overcome most of the limitations of clicker systems, have become widely available. However, the suitability of use for such systems in accelerated degree programmes such as graduate entry to medicine (GEM) has yet to be assessed. Therefore, we utilised Socrative, a freely available SRS, in a physiology component of a first year GEM module to ascertain, a) its ease of deployment, b) its popularity with students and, c) if they felt it improved their learning. There were no technical problems using Socrative. Further, 93% of respondents to an attitudinal survey strongly agreed or agreed that they favoured using Socrative in the classroom, and that they felt that it had improved their learning (92%). Thus, our data strongly indicate that the use of SRSs like Socrative would be highly valued even by the time-pressured, relatively mature students enrolled on accelerated professional courses such as GEM.
Highlights
Prior to the advent of Web-based teaching tools around 2011, if educators wished to gather in class, real time, information on student understanding/opinion, they could either ask students to raise their hands in response to a question or utilise a computerised audience response (‘clicker’) system
The study was undertaken at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland as part of the Physiology component of a fourteen week pre-clinical module, GM1002 (Fundamentals of Medicine II), which comprises Anatomy, Microbiology, Pathology and Pharmacology components (N.B. to date, the author (M.G.R.) is the only lecturer to have used Socrative during lectures and/or practical sessions on the graduate entry to medicine (GEM) program and the students had not had any prior exposure to this SRS)
The evidence presented here strongly supports the use of SRSs such as Socrative as an aid to enhancing perceived student learning outcomes even in accelerated graduate entry programs such as GEM
Summary
Prior to the advent of Web-based teaching tools around 2011, if educators wished to gather in class, real time, information on student understanding/opinion, they could either ask students to raise their hands in response to a question or utilise a computerised audience response (‘clicker’) system. Hardware-based clicker systems typically consist of three elements: presentation software such as PowerPoint, receiver hardware, and response devices/clickers They have been used fairly widely within higher education for a variety of purposes and have generally been both popular with students and, most likely because they encourage students to become active learners through knowledge application and/or cooperative learning, have provided demonstrable improvements in student engagement, learning and exam performance (Cain and Robinson 2008, Caldwell 2007, Keough 2012, Lantz 2010, Liu and Taylor 2013, Michael 2006, Vicens 2013). In spite of their general popularity, and educational benefits to students of using these systems, the cost of hardware and software required to run them, paired with technical issues associated with their use (e.g. time required to set up and dismantle system for each lecture, testing/registering of clickers, handing out and collecting clickers, non-functional clickers, insufficient numbers of clickers, etc.) (Barnett 2006, Caldwell 2007, Hoffman and Goodwin 2006, Keough 2012, Liu and Taylor 2013), has deterred many potential users, ourselves included, from utilising them routinely in classes. The requirement for students to purchase, or be given, their own ‘clicker’ is obviated by the near ubiquitous ownership and ever presence of either smart phones, tablets or laptops by students
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