In 2004, The National Veterinary School (NVS), as part of its policy to modernise its teaching methods via the use of ICTE (Information and Communication Technologies for Education), turned to electronic voting to lend interactivity to its lecture courses.
As for any ICTE tool, the instructor has several teaching scenarii to choose from. In addition to the more traditional scenario of asking questions during the course, so as to enliven instruction and make it more dynamic, the most effective teaching scenario is the following:
- Ask a few questions at the beginning of the session, in order to confirm the previous week’s instruction.
- Once again, ask a few questions at the end of the session, in order to determine the group’s level of understanding regarding what has just been discussed.
Based on the results, the instructors can reorganise their course and adapt it to their students, thereby ensuring a maximum level of understanding. At the National Veterinary School, the voting keypads are used to determine the students’ level of understanding and produce a “comprehension assessment” that is greatly appreciated by the students themselves and which helps them determine where they stand with regard to their training.
Question preparation is time-consuming…
NVS has obtained the support of the Region for financing the purchase of 50 PowerVote voting keypads.
It has even convinced the next-door Engineering School to co-invest in the project, potentially increasing the number of voting keypads to one hundred.
Thinking up and preparing the questions requires a significant amount of time on the part of the instructors; this would seem to limit the use of this solution. “Question preparation is too complicated. This task remains a hurdle for instructors, and so it is our ICTE centre that prepares the layout of the PowerVote questionnaires. Today, at NVS, only 10% of teachers make use of these voting keypads,” explains a research engineer responsible for the school’s ICTE.
… But the method pays off
“We spend time preparing the questions, but the results speak for themselves. The instructors have noticed that the students are more involved when the voting handsets are used during class,” she explains. Interactive and fun instruction seems to have won over these veterinary students.
A new software programme is currently being studied to simplify question preparation. This would allow the National Veterinary School to increase the number of instructors who make use of the electronic PowerVote keypads.
Tags : Éducation, Formation, Lyon, student response system, Veterinary school, wireless voting keypads
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