A Little More on EDUCAUSE Day Two

Following up on my last post, I wanted to share one interesting way free-response questions are being used at Abilene Christian University.

Kyle Dickson, in his portion of the ACU presentation today, described a tool they’ve developed for their iPhone-enabled classroom response system.  An instructor can pose a free-response question such as “What 20th Century event has had the most impact on American society?”  (Kyle used a question like this in his example.)  Students then submit their responses to this question using their iPhone.  The instructor can then view those responses, select a subset of them (perhaps the most popular, perhaps ones she’s particularly interested in discussing), and turn that subset into the answer choices for a multiple-choice question (with the same question stem) to be asked of all the students.

This sounds like a great tool to me.  Often, instructors aren’t sure how students will respond to a given question, so letting it be open-ended is helpful to see the range of student responses.  However, once an instructor gets a better feel for those responses, a multiple-choice question based on those responses is useful for polling an entire class more systematically.  This process often happens outside the bounds of a single class session, with instructors constructing multiple-choice questions based on student responses to free-response questions asked as part of pre-class homework.  The ACU tool enables this entire process to happen during class, which sounds pretty exciting.

It’s getting late here in Orlando, so I’ll wrap up this series of blog posts.  More tomorrow!

Update: EDUCAUSE Connect has posted some resources for the Abilene session I attended, including links to videos demonstrating the iPhone tools ACU has developed.