DoIT Pilots Poll Everywhere as BYOD Clickers

Wed, 18 May 2022 12:08:31 -0400
active-learning, ars, clickers, crs, poll-everywhere, turning

10/6/22 Update:

To clarify, during the 2022-23 academic year, while DoIT pilots the Poll Everywhere institutional license, we will continue to also support Point Solutions (formerly Turning Technologies) per student subscription model sold at the UMBC Bookstore, which have also been discounted.

Beginning next Fall, DoIT will support a campus-wide pilot of Poll Everywhere, an audience response system that can be utilized in face-to-face and online courses instead of traditional, physical clickers. There will be no cost to faculty or students to use Poll Everywhere.

Instead of owning a physical clicker, students will participate in polls by using their mobile devices, often referred to as BYOD (bring your own device). Without hardware constraints of physical clickers, faculty can utilize a number of question types including open-ended questions, clickable image questions, ranking, Q&A, surveys, and competitions in addition to standard multiple choice or true/false questions. Faculty can prepare polls before classes using a web-based interface and share questions and results with other colleagues as well. Poll responses can be graded and the scores can be passed back to the Blackboard gradebook. Lastly, Poll Everywhere can be used during synchronous, online class meetings since no other hardware is needed.

Without the barrier of purchasing a clicker or a supplemental software license, DoIT hopes to promote and better support active learning strategies through the implementation of classroom response systems.

More information about the pilot, transition, and training opportunities for PollEverywhere will be announced on the Instructional Technology myUMBC group over the summer.