Questions, technology, but mostly INTERACTION.

Congratulations Dana!

I love the article and I think you are uncovering this problem we have here for a while now, across the whole academic sector.

Majority of my time in the school I have spent on lectures, that were ~2hours long and there was a very little space for a Q&A. But that is understandable when you look at the concept of a lecture and how many students need to receive some information. While studying in Singapore, I first time saw a great tool to verify how much students know called a clicker. Maybe, this device is often used on many universities, but I was surprised how such a little thing can provide some feedback. Let’s not say it can replace a genuine question. It can not. But it can get us more interactive with what we try to learn.

So basically, tutor is asking exactly these question. Do you know what is “X”? And people tend to lie themselves saying, “I know right?”. So then he can ask you to vote what it is, anonymously, with zero shame. After that the tutor see the results of how many people roughly understand the concept. Clickers are unfortunately many times used for verifying attendance, shame.

Anyway, this is not about a clicker, it is about more interaction, making sure we know what we learn about and have this joy of pieces coming together.

Thanks for talking about questions, we now identified the problem, we now need to come up with a scalable solution.