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(female speaker). [unclear audio].
(Eric Kinser). At IU?
One of the courses we're talking to is the--I'm going to forget
the number--it's a professional development course.
They write resumes, they talk about interviewing style.
(female speaker). [unclear audio].
(Eric). Yes, it's like a 200- or
300-level class.
I believe ICORP, with Rex Cutshall, is also talking to us
about the use of this material.
I don't know how far he is into that process, I know we have
talked to him, he is interested.
I don't know where his decision-making standpoint
is right now.
(female speaker). Is there somebody in IT that is
charged with assisting implementation of this?
(Eric). No, it's us.
We manage it all.
I'm trying to think if we use anybody at all
outside of our department.
I don't think we do.
(female speaker). Who's the official sponsor at
your school for TurningPoint?
(Eric). Actually, my wife, Amy Kinser.
She manages, to a large degree, the K201 course, and she kind of
spearheads most of our development.
So if somebody is going to talk to us about it, somebody's going
to manage it, that's typically who it comes through.
(female speaker). Okay, so other departments
would tend to give her a call.
(Eric). We haven't worked that out yet
[laughs] , that's one of the things we're thinking about
because there is....
(female speaker). I can see this getting bigger
and bigger and bigger.
(Eric). Yeah, so do we [laughter].
We want to help, if people want help with this system we'd be
more than happy to do that.
One thing we can't do is become the tech support for the entire
department, or for the entire school, because then that takes
away from our ability to teach.
So we are kind of acting as kind of just a spearhead.
We're doing this, we're innovating at the School of
Business, but I don't know what our level of involvement
would be with the other courses directly.
(female speaker). So you don't have like a
department of Instructional Technology that perhaps
would spearhead.
(Eric). My understanding at this point
is that our IT department is not terribly involved in this.
They don't set anything up for us, we take care of all that.
Now, should this get implemented, you know, if the
whole school adopts, I'm sure they'd have to become involved.
One of the things we've talked about in one of the prior
sessions was the number that you click into to register for your
section, the channel number.
I was going to talk about that a little later, I'll just go
ahead and bring it up.
We use very similar numbers and we found that this was becoming
an increasing problem.
Our lecture students click into 72, the K201 students click
into 76, and you can go and look, one of the common problem
features we have is students that have participated
but never registered their clickers.
I would bet good money those are all K201 students that have
punched into the wrong channel in the next lecture hall over
and are responding to K201 questions on my system.
So we have to manage all that stuff right now.
Eight weeks into the semester, I still start off every lecture
telling my students it's "go, seven, two, go".
The first slide comes up with that on it because I still have
people registering into the wrong lecture section, so that's
something we've had to manage throughout time.
(female speaker). Would you then, when you
implement this campus-wide, underneath room number as you
walk in the room, would you implement something that said
"go, seven, two, go", you know what I mean, to make sure that
everybody knew that okay, I'm in this room now.
(male speaker). Yeah, we assign different
frequencies to different rooms here on campus and then the
general ones that are in general classrooms or the lecture hall,
we have those seperate as well.
And we went around before we put it on every machine or in every
classroom and tested it so we didn't have the crossover.
(female speaker). So you did it by physical, you
did it the logical because you just have a few.
(Eric). We've only got two classes
using it right now, yeah, actually something I've not
really put a lot of thought into right now because
there just aren't very many of us using it.
But I suspect, just my hunch would be that we would
probably end up assigniing it by instructor.
I don't really know why I think that, it's just seems to me like
that would be the thought process.
(male speaker). [unclear audio].
(Eric). Well, I mean, we all, most of us
have our own laptops that were assigned to us, we have our own
response ID, USB drives.
I just would imagine that they would say you're number 50, have
fun with that, you know, you're number 72, and our students
would be accustomed to using just those, assigning as an
instructor with that.
I have no idea if that's how it would actually go.
I think either way is fine.
Right now, one of the problems that we face is that the
TurningPoint software is not campus-wide, so when I come into
a lecture hall and I have my PC here, it doesn't have
TurningPoint on it, so I have to use my own laptop, which is why
we probably have been driven to using our own channel numbers.
(female speaker). [unclear audio].
(female speaker 2). [unclear audio] this is
something I deal with everyday.
In this situation, that's definitely [unclear audio].
(Eric). KInd of hard to coordinate
four people.
(female speaker 2). Right.
When it comes to the classrooms, it's very centralized by IT,
the most successful implementations are centralized
by IT, assigned by room, but it's very centralized, and
the professor, while you're very technologically savvy,
not every professor, every [unclear audio], gets it.
The newer system is going to be even easier to use, but some
people still are like, I put my channel where?
So, you know, making it simple and quick and easy as possible
is my recommendation [laughter].
(Eric). And I would suspect basically,
our IT system works on campus, should this become a campus-wide
or a large scale initiative, then the systems in the lecture
halls would have the software installed and it probably would
move more to basing the channel number on the class.
I know there's lots of interference issues you
have to think about.
Just quickly, we don't post grades directly to the students,
we don't tell them what percent they got right.
We actually just tell them, you know, we got your answers,
you're fine, you didn't participate that particular day,
generally meaning you were absent or we haven't
gotten a clicker registration from you so we don't
recognize your ID number.
That's the feedback we give on the initial end.
Again, I was going to ask here how many of you actually track
grades and how do you do it.
I realize TurningPoint works with WebCT and Blackboard,
integrates with that.
Does it work with Sequel Server as well?
There's an Enterprise manager option, we
assumed that meant....
(female speaker 2). Right, right, yes.
(Eric). Okay.
Excel, we use a database, I don't track grades,
WebCT-Blackboard, okay, that's interesting.
Again, looking at systems we have right now, the only thing
we would be able to go with there is just the Excel,
Access database options.
I know Angel is used by, I believe, our MBA programs--
I don't know if that would be an option for us.
Or creating our own database that it would
plug directly into.
This is the screen we have for individual students,
so if Johnny comes up, or in this case I come up to myself
and say did I participate, the initial screen shows me
the student's information.
I can collect notes if the student's clicker broke during
class or whatever I might need to record on that
student, the clickers assigned to that student,
he or she is registered.
I can also very quickly look at participation summaries over the
classes, so we can say in lecture 2 there are 300 points
possible, you got 200 of them, basically over three questions
you got two of them right.
And then it also tells me what section they were entered.
The hand entered option is for the most part obsolete.
For the first two or three semesters we actually handed out
scantrons as needed, tried not to penalize students, you know,
just because they were learning a new technology.
We kind of feel at this point almost everybody has used the
clickers long enough and the new students coming in are savvy
enough that we don't have to fall back on scantrons anymore.
The rate of failure in the classroom itself is
non-existant, so if for whatever reason somebody's batteries fail
or their clicker breaks during class they can just come up and
talk to us and we basically hand them a get-out-of-jail-free card
for that day.
Something we do have to talk about, too, though, amongst us
as a group is how do we handle--I'm running really low
on time--how do we handle broken clicker issues.
This is the database as it assigns points, it looks at
the class average.
Basically what we do if you're within two standard
deviations--kind of statistical mathematical--but if you're
within two standard deviations of the class average on
responses, you get the points for that class.
We think you're trying, you're working to take in the topics,
and that's okay with us, that's what we're looking for,
that you're giving an effort.
Outside of two standard deviations, we figure somebody
is kind of asleep and just hitting one, one, one, one,
that kind of a thing.
And we find that very rarely do we have to throw those out.