Sukhbinder Barn, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, Middlesex University London
Abstract:
Whilst there is a clear recognition of the importance of feedback in terms of developing student learning and engagement, feedback still tends to be something we do to our students. There needs to be a greater emphasis on dialogue, and students feeding back to tutors to demonstrate their engagement and understanding of assessment or any other aspects of their educational experience. This session will examine the implementation of interactive classroom technology and its appeal to a wide range of student learning styles as well as its ability to facilitate student-teacher interaction.
Session summary:
Given the growing number of instructional technological tools available to marketing educators, as well as increasingly technologically savvy and diverse cohorts of students, it has become incumbent upon UK Higher Education Institutions to design learning units which embrace the use of appropriate learning technologies which facilitate and enhance classroom engagement.
This session explored the embedded use of Socrative, a free web-based and mobile application as an effective tool to gather feedback and develop a clearer understanding of student progression and achievement. Through an application of the Shannon-Schramm Communication Model, the session provided insights to developing pedagogical strategies for intervention in teaching spaces to enable achievement of learning outcomes.
The session was broken down into three sections:
- Socrative in action: evidence from inside and outside the classroom. This will also include a demonstration of how other technologies can be linked to the use of Socrative to increase and enhance student engagement and participation;
- Playing with Socrative: participants will required to download and have hands on engagement with the tool to establish its ease of use and how they might use it in their own teaching sessions;
- Socrative on Boards of Studies: Demonstration of an application of the technology for wider use in terms of generating student feedback for Boards of Studies as well as generating general Programme feedback
Attendee feedback:
Sukhbinder used Socrative to increase student-teacher interaction and allow students to feedback their learning experience to a lecturer. This technology, he said, allowed the lecturer to build a trusty and supportive atmosphere during classes where students had opportunities to share their ideas and concerns as well as ask questions. Positive feedback from students showed that well planned and balanced use of technologies may bring many benefits and improve students' learning experience.