This story by William Gillis originally appeared in the Feb/March 2004 edition of Rounds

   Since the college’s inception, OU-COM instructors have devised ingenious methods for encouraging students to participate and provide feedback in the classroom. More than fifteen years ago, Peter Dane, D.O., used color-coded cards that students would raise into the air to provide answers to questions.

   Now, in 2004, new technology makes it easier for the college’s instructors to do what they have always strived to do: get students involved. On Jan. 9, OU-COM debuted a state-of-the-art student response system during an EKG lecture on dysrhythmia diagnosis by Dean Jack Brose, D.O.

   As first-year students entered Irvine 194 for the class, they were handed infrared transmitters that resemble a TV remote control. Before the lecture, three infrared receivers were positioned on the stage. At key junctures of his lecture, Brose asked students to answer a question displayed on the auditorium’s screen. Students then selected an answer using their transmitter. After a minute or two, the system tabulated the results, and Brose was able to display them with a bar graph showing the distribution of answers.

   Brose says that the student response system helped him tailor his lecture according to the  responses of the students, who remain anonymous as they answer the lecturer’s questions.

   “The anonymity factor helps a great deal,” Brose says. “It also helps me as a lecturer because on some of the slides that we did, there were things that I thought students would have trouble with, and yet when they voted, they obviously knew that material; I didn’t have to spend more time on it. There were other things where the students were split half and half between two answers, and I knew that we needed to spend a little more time on those topics. So I was able to change the lecture on the fly.”

   “I think it really has some possibilities,” Brose adds. “It engages the students, and I think it’s fun for them to match their knowledge with other students in the class. We’ve got some fine tuning to do and I think there are a lot of ways it can be used. I think the way I used it today is only one of them. But I think it’s going to be a really great system.”

   About 80 first-year students attended Brose’s lecture, and the “response” was overwhelmingly positive. Most students felt that the system helped them stay more engaged in the lecture and helped them gauge their understanding of the material.

   “It’s a good way to get students participating and get immediate feedback to questions,” says first-year student Elizabeth Sabey. “It helps to participate and answer questions. You know what your response was, so you can gauge what areas you need to focus on more. In a large class like this, it’s a good way to get actively involved in the lectures.”

   “I liked it because it’s easy for the professor to visualize what you’re confused on and be able to explain why the wrong answer is wrong and why the right answer is right,” first-year student David Darding says.

   The student response system runs on software called TurningPoint, which allows instructors to compose questions during their lectures when they want to elicit feedback and gauge students’ understanding of the material. The questions can be composed via an easy-to-use toolbar in PowerPoint, which many instructors already use for lectures.

   The system’s deployment is another example of a successful cooperative effort among OU-COM faculty and staff. The project was spearheaded by Mark Loudin, multimedia producer/director; Dan Johnson, director of instructional development; Doug Mann, Ph.D., executive assistant to the dean and associate professor of social medicine; and Allen Reed, IT desktop support manager.

   Mann, one-time associate provost for technology for OU, was heavily involved in promoting the use of student response systems in OU classrooms. OU-COM strives to keep all of its classes small and interactive, with much of the coursework designed around practice cases and clinical presentations, says Mann. Yet he says that some topics are best covered in large group sessions.


   “Faculty and students both have been frustrated that we haven’t been able to get the larger classes to be interactive,” Mann says. “I think this technology is the missing piece that we needed to make large group sessions feel as interactive as all the small group work that we do in the curricula.”

   Like Brose, Mann believes that allowing students to participate anonymously encourages students to get involved and answer questions honestly.

   “People aren’t eager to admit that they ‘don’t get it’ in front of a large group,” Mann says. “I think people get more comfortable talking about what they know and what they don’t know in small group work, but nobody wants to do that in front of 100 people. So this is an ideal way to find that out.”

   Three infrared receivers have been permanently installed in lecture halls in Irvine and Grosvenor. The college owns seven other receivers, which can be set up in any classroom. One receiver can handle as many as 44 transmitters at a time.

   Reed says it’s very satisfying when members of the IS/IT department can harness the latest technology to help instructors teach better and, in turn, help students learn more.

   “It’s good to see how the faculty respond,” Reed says. “A light comes on when they see what they can do with the technology. It’s pretty great.”

   Reed says that some colleges “permanently” assign students transmitters to use for the entire school year. He adds that professors can take advantage of several features the TurningPoint software offers. For example, PowerPoint can track the results of each question posed by the instructor, who can then pour those results into an Excel spreadsheet to track a class’s performance.

   Mann says that instructors can even take a portable transmitter on the road to provide interaction during CME lectures. As for Mann himself, he’s looking forward to what the student response system promises for his own lectures.

   “As a lecturer, I don’t like looking out over a sea of tired faces,” Mann says. “You just don’t know — are they with me or are they not with me? And you keep on plodding along. I’m looking forward to using the system when I’m covering biostatistics or reviewing journal articles. I’ll just be able to make it a lot more interactive.”

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