TM1: Voting, polls, synchronous testing

Vote

source: http://cyberthevote.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Cyber-The-Vote-Polling-Place.jpg

Till now we have dealt with a classic type of on-line testing (e-assessment): the individual one. Individual learning and assessment methods are dominating in education, but collaborative methods and assessment are up-and-coming, so we have to follow their development.

Voting, polls

For most of us, voting and polls are familiar, and we do it frequently in non educational situations. We are also familiar with some aspects of educational quality development where polls about teacher performance, or voting for our representatives in our schools are quite common.

There are on-line tools to help those atcivities, like Doodle, LimeSurvey or Google Forms.

It is not surprising that those tools made it also to learning management systems like Moodle. Let us go one step forward and start thinking about the use of those tools for collaborative learning methods. How can we use voting or polls in on-line collaborative learning:

With group choice (polling or voting) tools you can help your audience to organise groups themselves.
Offering a choice to the whole audience or learning groups: to select a topic, to select a working method.
With polling tools you can ask stimulating questions to the whole audience or working group.
With polling tools you can test working groups’ achieved level of understanding in their topics, or test their attitude with the actual collaboration.
With longer surveys (directed to groups) you can organise group assessment. (Quizzes are dedicated to individual learners always)

Synchronous testing

Collaborative on-line assessment can obviously be done simoultaneously, which is called synchronous assessment or testing. We discuss it separately, because the educational situation it is used and the tools are different. Synchronous tesing can be done in classroom situations as well, but also in remote web conferencing situations.

In a classroom there are easy to use tools to organise collaborative learning and collaborative assessment, even in elementary schools. Those applications are designed to help the teacher in organising quiz games in their classes, by using a centrally projected quiz screen. The answers have to be entered by learners on their own smart-phones or tablets. In case of limited resources, groups may be formed in line with the number of equipment availabe in the class. Most commonly used tools are:

Finally let us take one step forward: Could we use synchronous testing tools in remote situations? Why not? In case of videoconferencing, we can share the teacher’s screen with quiz questions, and audience may use their smart-phones to answer. Some vendors like Adobe has already introduced synchronous polling and voting tools in their applications.