After a couple of semesters teaching our very large introductory statistics course, I was given the “privilege” of teaching in the Fisher & Paykel lecture theatre – which holds over 600 students. I quickly realised I needed a way to interact with all these hundreds of students in such a large space!
I found I could set a discussion-based problem and that one loop around the lecture theatre, stopping in to listen and participate in a few conversations, was a good amount of time to give students to engage. To encourage contributions, I would summarise one conversation (yes, a sample of one!) and then target another group I had engaged with “on my travels” to share what they had discussed in front of the whole lecture.
This approach worked well for encouraging discussion in such a large teaching space but I wanted more! We already used the “clicker” system Quizdom, but I wanted to make more use of student’s mobile phones and devices. I wanted them interacting with each other and with me. And I wanted a system to facilitate these interactions.
My first “large scale interactive” involved getting students to tap their phones as many times as they could during one minute, using an app I developed. My initial approach for encouraging large-scale interactivity is shown below:
I shared my ideas and experimentation with interactives at Department of Statistics (University of Auckland) teaching symposium in September 2017. The video below is a screen recording of the talk and covers the foundational ideas for the project, shows an example of a large scale interactive, and includes department discussion about these ideas.
Anna is a Lecturer in the Department of Statistics, University of Auckland.