Yesterday evening, Helen Carr (Director of Learning and Teaching and module convenor for LW588 Public Law 1) and I took 100 TurningPoint handsets over to Woolf Lecture Theatre for a lecture Helen was giving about the English Legal System to prepare students for their upcoming summative assessment in Week 6. The advantage of using TurningPoint for this lecture (hopefully) makes the delivery more interesting for the students (particularly at 5pm on a Thursday!) and it also helps the students to see where they may need to re-visit (or in some cases visit for the first time) particular sections of the course before their assessment.
TurningPoint (picture right) is an interactive response system that enables students to answer questions posed by the lecturer during the lecture and view the responses in a graphical format. Think ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ but without the exciting music. There are a couple of software options for using TurningPoint but we used the plugin for PowerPoint that integrates the questions into a PowerPoint presentation. The advantage of this (at least in my opinion) is that many academic staff are already familiar with PowerPoint so it is not a huge step from creating a slide to creating a TurningPoint slide and adding some questions. I tried this on both 2003 and 2007 versions of PowerPoint, and whilst it works on both, the options are much more obvious and easier to change in 2007.
Those of you who know the University will probably be thinking, ‘Woolf Lecture Theatre is a bit big for 100 students’. Here’s where we were breaking from the norm. Currently, the University only have 100 TurningPoint handsets, but our largest module has 524 students and the module last night has a total of 385 students so we had to work out how best to spread 100 handsets over 300+ students.
In the end, we decided to get the students to work in teams of two or three. I had a couple of concerns about this, the first being the logistics of handing out and retrieving the handsets, and the second being that students in groups with a ‘new toy’ could lead to quite a bit of noise which may disrupt the flow of the lecture.
Logistics wise, it all worked out well. Helen and I set up the receiver for the TurningPoint handsets and started the PowerPoint presentation, by which time most of the students were seated (about 250 students). We then distributed the handsets to students in groups of two or three with Helen doing one side of the lecture theatre and me doing the other side. This only took about 5 minutes to do, which was much quicker than I’d anticipated and I was left with three handsets which I then gave to the students who turned up late. Gathering the handsets in was also fairly simple, Helen stood at one door and I stood at the other and the students handed in handsets as they left with a quick check after everyone had left to make sure there were no handsets left lying around.
The lecture itself went well. Helen’s slides were well composed with a number of questions that may come up in the students’ assessment in week 6 and a following explanation describing why the correct answer was indeed the correct answer. The students engaged well with the questions and seemed to enjoy the opportunity to discuss each question in their groups before answering. Whilst it got a bit noisy at times, generally the students quietened down between each question and Helen was able to complete all of the questions she intended to ask during the lecture.
My final thoughts? I wasn’t sure whether getting students to work in groups in a large lecture theatre was going to work, but I was pleasantly surprised that it not only worked but seemed to be very effective. The proof will be in the results from the assessment in week 6, but from looking round the lecture theatre, the students seemed engaged and interested and there was definitely a lot of note-taking going on! If you’ve been put off from using TurningPoint because you teach more than 100 students in your lecture, I’d certainly recommend giving it a go. In fact, even in smaller groups I think that asking the students to work in groups works well and encourages them to discuss their answers and in some cases argue why their answer is correct.
For a bit more information on the pedagogy of using TurningPoint handsets, have a look at Susanne Krauss’ PowerPoint slides and bibliography from her demonstration at the E-learning forum (ELF) last May.
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