CP – Should Technology such as i-clickers, tophatmonocle and webassign be used in classes?

There has been an accelerated growth of “Classroom 2.0” in the past few years, where the art of learning has been enhanced with tools such as nifty PowerPoint slides, slick tablets, and surround sound systems. Although it’s true that speakers and cool animations do add a layer of visual and audio clarity that might be hard to mimic without such devices, it’s hard to say the same for the new and “interactive” tools that have piggybacked on the success of “technology in the classroom”. More and more courses are implementing devices such as iClickers and the recently developed MonocleCAT application/web-service—but adding a new technology doesn’t make it useful. In fact, the majority of ‘interactive’ applications are just the opposite: they are useless to the learning environment, misleading to professors, and more importantly, a big waste of students’ money.
A little background information on iClickers, for those of you who are lucky enough to have gone without it this far: an iClicker is a, well, clicker. It’s a miniature version of a remote control, with five buttons: one for each letter from A to E. Students can vote for what they think the answer to a multiple choice question. Pretty cool, right?
Not exactly. The effectiveness of your iClickers depends on what it’s being used for. Every iClicker comes with a code that can be registered to match a student’s identity. Thus, some courses make it mandatory for students to bring an iClicker to class, and the multiple choice questions asked during lecture make up a portion of your grade. So instead of lectures being a place where you can peacefully learn (or sleep), you’ll be having mini-quizzes throughout the term.
Alternatively, your professor can make iClickers optional, and give you participation marks for using it. Some Profs have done this; you don’t lose anything by bringing your iClicker to class, and your answers aren’t being graded, but if you do faithfully participate in the multiple choice questions, you’ll get a small ‘participation bonus’ at the end of the semester. iClickers are supposedly helpful because students are more willing to submit an answer anonymously than speak out their opinions, or raise their hands in class which helps gauge the understanding of the class.
The latter situation probably has the biggest evil. Consider this: my class has been using iClickers since our 1A term (approximately one course per term). Although the iClicker participation rate was closer to 60-80% in our 1A term, by 2A, an average of 50 students participated for each clicker question. Now, a professor will generally assume that a class is comfortable with a concept, and move on to the next topic, if 50% or more of the class chooses ‘the right answer’. If 50% of the 50 students got the right answer, that’s only 25 students in the class. As you might have guessed, the majority of the 25 of students who are actually getting the right answer are probably guessing or are the keeners in the front rows. But see what the iClicker did there? It took the results from 25% of the class, and generalized it for the entire set of 100 students. For all you know, the other 75% of the class might be hopelessly lost.
Now, MonocleCAT is even worse. MonocleCAT is an application developed by the start-up company, Top Hat Monocle. Based on the premise that “students are bringing an array of devices to classes, including laptops, net-books, cell phones, Blackberries, iPhones and iPads”, Top Hat Monocle wants to “activate the learning process by pushing out a simulation to student devices” (Source: www.tophatmonocle.com). One of the co-founders of MonocleCAT came to our classroom to further add that MonocleCAT is ‘better’ than iClickers, because you don’t need to bring “extra hardware” (such as an iClicker) to the classroom as obviously, 100% students bring their laptops to class.
Contrary to popular opinion, most students don’t bring laptops to class. This is fairly obvious, even if you aren’t in engineering: if every student was bringing a laptop to class, then computer labs wouldn’t be crammed with students during peak class hours. From personal observation, I’ve seen one out of ten students in every class use a laptop during lectures. The fact that most students don’t bring laptops to class is made even more obvious by the fact that you can’t take notes on a laptop for math and physics courses. Second, suppose that simulations were being introduced to students—if participation is optional, what is motivating students to try out these simulations anyway and not, say, surf Facebook? MonocleCAT is accessed through the internet—if you ‘push’ these simulations at students, you will have unleashed the power of the interwebs through the entire class during lecture.
If, on the other hand, the ‘simulation’ was mandatory in class, then what about the students who can’t afford laptops? Laptops aren’t iClickers. An iClicker costs somewhere around $40; laptops are closer to $400 (which is rather cheap for a laptop).
From personal experience, the simulations on MonocleCAT aren’t very novel anyway—you can click and drag a few things, which is fun, but most of the simulations show basic concepts that you can usually find animations for online. Most of the simulations are processor-heavy, and can really slow down an older machine.
The bottom line: a few sparkly simulations, or clickable buttons, are not going to keep students awake any more than the advent of the speaker, or the digital projector, has. If you think Calculus is boring, adding a smattering of multiple choice questions is not going to make the content any less boring. If students really wanted to know the material, they’d go to class prepared, attentive, and focused. No need to force us to shell out big bucks for technology that, at the end of the day, is like jewelery: useless… but pretty!