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Live Response & Feedback
Engaging with students live in class
Synchronous sessions work best when they are active, engaging and meaningful. However, none more so than when the student is involved within the session and their voice is heard. Feedback and involvement in the conversation leads to more active learning and in turn leads to more engagement.
This page will highlight some key ideas about how you can use the tools at the University to help develop live responses and feedback within your learning and teaching.
The boxes below give a summary of the information on this page:
It’s important that the student voice is seen to be a part of the learning to help them feel empowered.
Polling live in class can be a useful way of pulse checking, debating or starting wider discussions around the taught material.
Students can use tools such as Padlet to record their thoughts online which can then be used to spark wider discussion within synchronous sessions.
Pulse Checking/ Feedback points
What is Pulse checking?
Pulse-checking are little activities that are run throughout the session to gauge the current understanding and thoughts of the students live within a synchronous session. Pulse checking activities are useful and feed into the assessment for learning cycle by helping you analyse any misconceptions as well as highlighting any areas of knowledge that need to be stretched or further support.
It is recommended to build in pulse-checking or pauses for reflection during your session. This will allow students to stay focused, ask any questions regarding the content. You can also use these moments to create small sense-checking tasks. These sense-checking tasks also enable you as a lecturer, to identify any misconceptions and redirect the teaching and learning to support the participants.
When teaching synchronously online you may no longer instinctively see body language and facial cues from your students, these pulse-checking points need to provide you with the confidence that your students are keeping up and engaging with the lesson. This will also add to the student voice and enable students to feel empowered within the classroom.
Polls to start discussion
Gathering opinions, ideas and testing knowledge
Polls, either used online or within a face to face context, can be a powerful way to gather information and feedback directly from students. It enables staff to use a multitude of question styles to check on current knowledge, gather ideas or can even be used for structured debates.
If you would like to engage you students and gather live feedback. We would recommending leading an activity with Poll everywhere. This tool can help you design a multitude of questions styles and can be used with a wide range of devices to give live responses to answers. This tool also gives the option to hide names, which can be a useful starting point to engage participants who find contributing difficult.
Showcase in Practice
Mr Trevor Simpson (School of Health and Social Care)
Students were asked a series of questions inside of a session to gauge their understanding. This feedback was then used to help facilitate discussion and address any areas of misconceptions.
Resources
We have curated some resources to help you get started with the tool.
Padlet
Discussing, evaluating and engaging
Sometimes within an activity we want students to be able to interact and respond with each other as well as find evidence and ideas to corroborate their discussions. This is where using Padlet within synchronous sessions can be a useful asset. Padlet enables students to use an online space to gather ideas, add comments and reply to each other on a particular chosen topic. The flexibility, as well as the live interaction, empowers students to feedback and direct learning based on opinions or research that they have found.
Many academics have used this tool synchronously as well as asynchronously as a way to gather data and highlight the students current understanding of core concepts. This can be used virtually or face to face and is what we call a ‘low entry threshold’ activity. Meaning that this activity has low technical requirements and is a fairly easy activity to embed and explain.
A useful feature built within padlet is to enable features such as ‘upvoting’ or ‘likes’ as well as enabling students to reply to each others ideas. This provides a safe platform for students and staff to share, respond and collaborate with each other as well as highlights to the staff key development opportunities and misconceptions that may be present in the students current understanding. The case study to the right shows how Charlotte Bailey used this with distance based learners, but highlights that it can be used in person as well as online.
Showcase in practice
Charlotte Bailey (National Centre for Food Manufacturing)
Charlotte Bailey used Padlet with her students to solve the challenge of work based distance learners being able to communicate in between live sessions. This was achieved through a study week which provided a chance to meet and interact with the students in an online situation and to foster an online community. The student feedback from this approach was seen as highly valued by the learners of the course.
Resources
We have curated some resources to help you get started with the tool.