Professors Engage — and Monitor — Students with Hand-Held Devices

I came across this story by accident this morning, "More Professors Give Out Hand-Held Devices to Monitor Students and Engage Them." Just before my 9:00am class — and a lecture on Congress — I was looking for an article on Charles Rangel's ethics trial. I found that, but also this story on hand-held devices in the classroom. And it was funny because at the end of last week's 9:00am class a student stayed after to complain about some of the students in the back. They were talking so much that she couldn't hear. I apologized at the time. I mentioned that I had just dismissed a couple students from my 7:30am class, so it wasn't as though I was indifferent to disruptions. Anyway, I joked this morning that I needed some of these monitors for 9:00am to keep students on task. And as I did, two other students raised their hands to indicate that they'd actually used these devices at universities they'd attended previously. I guess I'm out of the loop, since this is the first time I'd heard of them:

If any of the 70 undergraduates in Prof. Bill White’s “Organizational Behavior” course here at Northwestern University are late for class, or not paying attention, he will know without having to scan the lecture hall.

Their “clickers” will tell him.

Every student in Mr. White’s class has been assigned a palm-size, wireless device that looks like a TV remote but has a far less entertaining purpose. With their clickers in hand, the students in Mr. White’s class automatically clock in as “present” as they walk into class.

They then use the numbered buttons on the devices to answer multiple-choice quizzes that count for nearly 20 percent of their grade, and that always begin precisely one minute into class. Later, with a click, they can signal to their teacher without raising a hand that they are confused by the day’s lesson.

But the greatest impact of such devices — which more than a half-million students are using this fall on several thousand college campuses — may be cultural: they have altered, perhaps irrevocably, the nap schedules of anyone who might have hoped to catch a few winks in the back row, and made it harder for them to respond to text messages, e-mail and other distractions.

In Professor White’s 90-minute class, as in similar classes at Harvard, the University of Arizona and Vanderbilt, barely 15 minutes pass without his asking students to “grab your clickers” to provide feedback

Though some Northwestern students say they resent the potential Big Brother aspect of all this, Jasmine Morris, a senior majoring in industrial engineering, is not one of them.

“I actually kind of like it,” Ms. Morris said after a class last week. “It does make you read. It makes you pay attention. It reinforces what you’re supposed to be doing as a student.”

More at the link.