Students ‘vote’ on parts of your material using a ?. You can use this information as feedback (good parts, good exercises,?…) or further use it (e.g. choice of next topic, choice of exercises to be looked at again). You will be able to see what parts/points are important to your students.
Detailed Task (for lecturer and students)
Ask students to vote on … because …
- Prepare your material in a way that students can vote on parts. (How to)
- Inform the students
- What will you use it for and why.
- e.g. The rules, e.g. Voting is open until (Date).
- e.g. The x items that have the most votes will …
- Let students know what you do with the information you get.
On the one hand, you get feedback. On the other hand, it is a collaborative decision.
Specific profit for case described below: It is a collaborative decision and students need to already think during the semester about which formulas they’ll need at the exam.
If there are too many votes to give, students may be overwhelmed. If the task is not important enough to them, they may not participate at all.
Case: Formula cheat sheet
Students 401-1151-00L Linear Algebra I in HS2016 voted on the formulas/theorems/definitions/… that they wanted to be inserted in the formula (cheat) sheet that they were allowed to use at the exam.
What was done:
- Prepare your material in a way that students can vote on parts. We used boxes. (How to)
- Inform the students, telling about the rules.
- Voting is open until (Date).
- The x items that have the most votes will be incorporated in the (cheat) sheet.
- Check at least once in the semester, which parts would be inserted in the formula cheat sheet and inform students.
- Finalize the definitive formula cheat sheet in advance. Students need to familiarize themselves with it.
This is the eSkript used: https://eskript.ethz.ch/linalgmath/
It was not planned but we ended up resetting the votes at the end of the semester in order for the students to vote again before the exam. They, the students, asked for it!
It amazed us that more than 78 students voted again!
The voting numbers changed quite a bit. Blue in the graph below are the amount of votes for the first round, orange for the second. In the second round, parts from the beginning of the semester (on the left in the graph) were not that important anymore and the students seemed to agree a bit more on what they found important (20 more votings with over 40 votes than in the first round).