How knowing what’s correct will help students and teachers alike

Higher Education

Dermott Madden
by Dermott Madden
How knowing what’s correct will help students and teachers alike

Last month Vevox Product Manager Matt Kelly explained how customer feedback was so important to the development of Vevox. True to his word, he’s kept listening to your requests and come up with another addition – this time specifically for our customers in education. To find out more I caught up with Amie Fletcher from the Vevox Education Team.

Dermott (dm): Hi Amie, I know you are busy preparing webinars and workshops at the moment, but can you explain what’s in this update and why you and your team are so excited by it?

Amie Fletcher (AF): This is a simple but powerful upgrade that I think our education customers will love. It reinforces learning for students and helps lecturers assess learning is taking place. Now lecturers and teachers can supply a correct answer when setting up their polls from the dashboard. When they run the poll, and after pushing the results, they then have the option to show the right answer. This is displayed on the Vevox polling projector and also the students’ devices, instantly. I particularly like the reporting feature. After the class the lecturer can download the results to Excel, as before, but there’s a new colour coded summary tab which displays visually the correct and incorrect answers per poll. I can see this being really useful for lecturers to assess understanding and prove learning is taking place in their classes.

dm: So do you think that this new feature will be widely used?

AF: Yes, definitely. In education live polling is used largely for assessment of understanding. Many of our customers run revision-style quizzes either at the start of a session to see if students have done their homework, remember the previous lecture or simply gauge their current knowledge of the subject. They may then also run a similar poll during or at the end of the lecture to see how much has been understood or how much more students now know. The majority of questions have a correct answer and giving this automatically on the screen will help students remember.
Of course sometimes Vevox is used for less clear-cut questions just to check opinion, to create live discussion or to generate ideas, so the correct answer reveal won’t always be used.

dm: I know you are in constant contact with the vast number of educators currently using Vevox every day, can you describe some of benefits that they will experience?

AF: Of course… by telling students the correct answer, they will retain the information better and feel encouraged by a sense of achievement, which ultimately helps improve their results. Lecturers and teachers can measure if learning is taking place, so they know which topics need more time and if certain individual students are struggling.

dm: Thanks so much for your time Amie. I imagine you’ll want to get back to fine tuning the education webinar series.

If anyone would like to attend any of the Vevox Education webinars its packed full of outstanding guest speakers from Southampton, Chester and Central Lancashire Universities plus ALT, you can email the team at education@vevox.com.

The November 2016 update to Vevox was released on November 10th. With our regular update cycle in full flow, expect to see even more exciting features arriving soon. Stay tuned by following us on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn for the latest news.

Dermott Madden
Customer Success Manager