Interactive Response Systems (IRS) have been gaining acceptance within the educational community in recent years and a clear proof is the growing number of commercial systems available today in the market. However, most solutions are based on systems which are closed, rigid and dependent on proprietary keypad or platform. We have developed OpenIRS-UCM, a free teaching tool for interactive polling that solves these drawbacks. It is an open source software so it allows the development of new functions by anybody. It has a friendly interface that anyone without high computer skills can use. It enables the coexistence of several commercial clickers simultaneously with smart-phones, tablets or other modern electronic devices. It is developed in Java, thus its use is not restricted to systems based on Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X and it is independent of any proprietary software as GNU-Linux.
The excellent acceptance of this teaching tool at University Complutense of Madrid has encouraged the creation of a repository that holds all the source code and executables files , in order to facilitate its widespread use.
OpenIRS-UCM is a completely public and low-cost IRS that follows free software guidelines to facilitate its distribution, promote its use and accelerate functionality development. It allows to collect the student's opinions in a classroom, in a laboratory or even remote tests through the Internet. Actually it is also interconnected with Moodle Learning Management System.
This system organizes quizzes or a group of questions into different sessions that are saved in a database. Before starting the class, the teacher should assign a communication mechanism to each student, record it properly, and add a group of questions including the right answers. This can be done manually or importing them by means of a Excel or comma-separated values (CSV) file. The system is able to receive simultaneously answers from many devices such as H-ITT, SunVote frequency radio clickers, mobile phones (like iPhone, Android) and any other devices connected to the Internet (as PDAs or computers by means of sockets interface). Teacher can obtain a feedback of student opinion by means of different types of charts. We would like to emphasize that OpenIRS-UCM is completely independent of the teaching method and it can use any slide program (Power Point, LibreOffice, LaTeX, etc), or even just a blackboard to survey students.
Soft-clickers
can be downloaded for iPhone,
Android
and any other PC,
laptop of PDA.
OpenIRS-UCM is also fully integrate with Moodle by means of quizopenirs module available in the sourceforge repository.
More information about OpenIRS-UCM can be found in “OpenIRS-UCM: an open-source multi-platform for interactive response systems”.
We describe, through a detailed example, the different features that our tool provides. In this video tutorial, any user can find more extensive explanations about our software. Figure 1 shows the big picture of the whole process required in order to collect the student’s opinions, which we have divided into three different stages. In the next three subsections we describe in detail each of these stages.
Fig 1. Stages involved in the process of collecting students’ opinion
The first step that the teacher should perform before going to the classroom is to configure properly the OpenIRS-UCM tool. As we said before, the application organizes tests into sessions. Therefore, the teacher should create a new session, filling in some information like the corresponding questions, the students IDs or the clickers-to-student association (referred to as roster file).
There are three ways to incorporate this information: (1) in the initial window (figure 2), the teacher selects File - Session - New Session. A new window opens, which allows the teacher to assign a name for the session, and also to import three files (in CSV or Microsoft Excel format) with the required information; (2) once the session has been created, the user selects Session - Edit Session - Question/Roster/Alumns - Add Question/Roster/Alumns’ File that opens a new window which enables to import the files needed (CSV or Microsoft Excel format are also supported); (3) individually adding, removing, editing or updating the session information related to a single student, question or roster. This task is accessible from the menu File - Session - Edit.
Fig
2. Main Window
OpenIRS-UCM provides two operating modes, anonymous (where no association between clickers and students is defined) and conventional which is the most discussed mode in this paper. In the anonymous mode, no student identity is stored, and the application will only deal with a list of clickers. The registration of these clickers must be performed during this configuration stage by using the anonymous registration tool in the Configuration menu.
In the case of the conventional mode, the association between students and clickers can be carried out in two ways: (1) it can be directly imported from a file, or (2) it can be filled in by the students once in the classroom using the real time registration tool in the Configuration menu. In this case, the system emulates a multiple choice test, where each option corresponds to a student’s name. When the students select the option related to their names by pushing the clicker, the system automatically establishes the corresponding student-clicker association. Finally, we should briefly describe the operation of the two tester modes that the system provides:
The Alumn Tester opens a new window that is split in two parts. In the left one, a list of all students included in this session is displayed. Whenever a student presses any button of the assigned clicker, the corresponding student name moves to the right section. This way, the teacher can find out attendance to the lecture.
The Clicker Tester opens a new window in which a clicker ID is inserted as soon as any message is sent from the mentioned device. It allows to check the correct operation of the clickers, as well as to find their internal ID (necessary for creating the roster information in the conventional mode).
Once the configuration task is completed, the teacher is ready to poll the audience opinion. The test begins as soon as Start Test button is pressed. A new bar opens, which allow us to control the different options: start/stop a question, scroll through the diverse questions, list the students who delivered an answer (Answers option) or illustrate feedback results (Results option). This bar may be visible in the desktop or remain resident in the System-Tray, in order not to interfere with any teaching task.
To perform a new question, the teacher should press the Play button. Figure 3 illustrates an example where the first question of a test is being performed, the students with the clicker identifier sunVoteM50-12, HITT2, and iPhone1 have answered, and there are still 62 seconds left to send answers. In this particular example, a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation illustrates on the background the statement for the aforementioned question and the 4 suggested answers. However, we should emphasize that OpenIRS-UCM is totally independent of the teaching method and it can use any slide-oriented application (Microsoft PowerPoint, LibreOffice, LATEX, etc).
Fig
3. Example of a test execution
When the time allotted to answer the question finishes or all students have already answered, the application stores answers information in the DB and moves automatically to the next question. In order to display the responses for the current question, some graphical information turns available when ticking the Results option.
Notably, four types of charts are available (Figure 4):
Clicker’s Bar: It is a bar chart that illustrates the answer sent from each clicker.
Answer’s Bar: It is also a bar chart, but it accounts for the number of times each option was clicked.
Answer’s Pie: It contains the same information as the previous graph, but showing percentages in a pie chart.
Yes/No Pie: It illustrates in a pie chart the percentage of correct and wrong answers.
Fig
4. Charts available with student opinion
Once the test has been completed, the teacher can export the information associated with a session to Microsoft Excel, CSV or XML-Moodle files by employing the option File - Export. This allows the teacher to perform a deeper data analysis. The XML-Moodle files allow the teacher to interact with a Moodle platform. This interaction is carried out through a new Moodle module called quizopenirs. This module emulates the behavior of a multiple choice quiz.
In order to perform the test assignment, the teacher should create a new Quiz OpenIRS-UCM activity in Moodle and once inside choose the XML-Moodle files corresponding to both questions and answers (Figure 5). Automatically, the questions and the answers are loaded into Moodle DB and student attempts are graded. Finally, it is worth to highlight that all the inherent functionalities of Moodle are still available. Notably, using the different reports that Moodle includes, the teacher can analyze some aspects derived from the test, like the average mark, if any question with special impact exists or if the repetition of the test is required in order to obtain a better evaluation of the students progress.
Fig
5. Moodle interaction with OpenIRS-UCM by means of quizopenirs
module.