Last spring I received an e-mail message from my university’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching that read like an advertisement:
“If you are thinking of ordering personal response system units, or clickers, for your class next fall, be sure to attend the upcoming CELT session, Using TurningPoint Clickers to Engage Students in the Classroom.”
Staff members at the center provide valuable services to evaluate and improve teaching. Their first impulse is to help, a trait they share with information-technology and bookstore personnel. In this case, though, the center was helping a company by providing workshops and promotion for a device resembling a television remote control.
Clickers, or “audience-response systems,” were designed in the 1960s in Hollywood to test unreleased movies, commercials, and television shows. A decade later, a retired planner at IBM, Bill Simmons, developed a rudimentary response system to simplify boring business meetings. Soon the business world commercialized and adapted audience-response systems to augment consultations and presentations.
Then, in one rhetorical stroke, manufacturers substituted “student” for “audience,” introducing clickers into education.
To use clickers, instructors adapt their pedagogy, soliciting responses via keypads. Students funnel data to a receiver connected to a laptop with proprietary software that displays results through presentation software, such as PowerPoint, into a projector and onto a screen.
Ira David Socol, a scholar of technology in special education at Michigan State University, states, “The idea of wasting money on a device no more sophisticated pedagogically than raising your hand drives me nuts, whether it is students’ money or the university’s.” Cellphones, he says, can perform the same tasks as clickers with more interactivity and less inefficiency.
Clickers function through several layers of hardware and software and, like television remotes, can be incompatible with other brands’ components or upgrades of previously compatible ones. If Microsoft updates PowerPoint in Office 2007, for example, the clicker system develops a glitch, and teachers must use Office 2003 until someone divines a fix.
Marketers seem to know our business better than we know theirs. That was apparent a few years ago, when publishers introduced infrared clickers bundled with specific textbooks or series of textbooks. In a class of 400 students, each of whom would spend $40 for a clicker, many institutions paid for the purchase and/or installation of receivers, in effect helping to sell the company’s products. Companies suggested clickers for multiple-choice questions based on a book’s content, an easy adaptation from previous instruction booklets with answer keys — not exactly innovative, but cost-effective, making books appear interactive overnight.
In the past, vendors introducing educational products would respond to requests for proposals on a low-bid basis, covering installation and maintenance costs as well as training workshops. Now those vendors pitch directly to professors, relying on IT departments to assume costs and on centers of teaching excellence to provide training in workshops and promotion in posters, e-mail blasts, and new-product releases.
In a ploy to get educators to adopt or retain textbooks, publishers infected academe with a grossly inefficient infrared system. That was later replaced by a more versatile and usable radio-frequency technology, but not before colleges and their students had spent untold millions on installation, purchases, and additional fees, not to mention utility, maintenance, and staff-support costs.
Businesses routinely take advantage of the helpful cultures of information-technology and teaching-excellence centers. The first impulse of many such campus programs is to be of service; the second is to be on the cutting edge of innovation in a technological environment. Such virtues, however, can be vices when manipulated by marketers whose goal is profit, not pedagogy.
In a 2004 document, “Introducing Student Response Systems at MU,” which is still online, educational-technology personnel at the University of Missouri noted that “national publishers have been promoting this technology to higher education as a way to increase their profits. By providing free receivers and discounts or rebates for student clickers sold with new textbooks, they hope to reduce the number of used-book sales. Additionally, different publishers have proprietary agreements with different response-system companies. ... Please be aware that this may lead to confusion as instructors change texts or classrooms, and as students begin having multiple classes using different kinds of clickers.”
What strikes me about the document is its collegial tone and willingness to be of service even while acknowledging the corporate profit motive.
Early infrared systems required several sensors to tabulate responses. Students had to point clickers at multiple receivers with sharpshooter precision. If a person’s head in front of you blocked transmission, the instructor’s receptor failed to register that response. A tech-support employee at Iowa State University, where I teach, recalls that students in one classroom purportedly had to walk up to the front of the room, a few feet from the receiver, for the system to work. An employee in academic advising recalls complaints about receivers’ failing to capture responses, resulting in “elaborate grading schemes” to compensate those making that claim.
To their credit, staff members at Missouri offered to help instructors determine if they really needed clickers. “If cost is not an issue,” the document says, “then instructors need to look at the different software and hardware features that best match the way they want to use the system in their class.”
The phrase “if cost is not an issue” seems to apply to the professors’ departments and not to students or their parents. In fact, at some institutions, students were routinely omitted from committees adopting these gadgets, on the presumption that they would focus on cost and overlook pedagogical benefits.
The irony astounds me. We invest in technology believing that it democratizes the classroom, fostering peer learning and engagement. In the case of clickers, we could have polled students (with or without clickers) on whether they thought the benefits of the technology outweighed the cost. They probably would have said no because of excessive student fees, which in Iowa and elsewhere have risen sharply in the past decade, due in part to inefficient technology typified by infrared clickers.
The economist Clark G. Ross, vice president for academic affairs at Davidson College, defined the prevailing mentality on a typical campus: If you can identify a benefit, you can justify the expense. Ross wasn’t speaking about clickers at a recent convention but about cost containment, which, in the wake of the student-loan scandal, is a major factor in retention because students no longer have access to easy money. To prepare for that reality, he said, we must abandon the notion that every new program or system with “a marginal benefit greater than zero” is worth the investment.
Before we switched to universal clickers at Iowa State University, we, like our peers at Missouri, went through the costly and inefficient infrared stage, requiring students to buy multiple clickers, which operated inefficiently on several platforms.
We asked our information-technology office to help resolve technical and other conflicts associated with the devices. In our search for a radio-frequency solution, we adopted a clicker model requiring some 2,000 students at the time to pay a $15 registration fee. When an IT employee at a meeting in 2005 was asked about that, he responded that this was the business model of the company desiring “steady cash flow from enrollments.”
Online registration using credit cards affords opportunities for data-mining names, types of cards, and other personal information. But in this case, a more serious privacy concern arose: Registration included access to such student records as quizzes and surveys. That generated concerns regarding the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act, so our legal department had to craft an agreement making the manufacturer liable for any breach of student data.
Students using radio-frequency clickers no longer pay registration fees for the devices at Iowa State, and our new vendor does not have access to records. But the history of clicker proliferation underscores important lessons about accountability.
In Iowa, state law requires the Board of Regents to review nontuition-related fees in excess of $1 per semester. Because the clicker fees go to the vendor rather than to the university, the company offering the devices has legally circumvented our accountability system.
To verify the extent to which business could infiltrate academe, I interviewed a publishing executive at a major house, asking him to respond to allegations that companies typically rely on institutions to provide free installation, support, maintenance, and promotion of infrared clickers, and that data-mining is possible via online registration, with the potential to resell that information, probably to credit-card companies.
Without acknowledging that his or other companies actually did this, the executive replied, “This sounds about right.”
I tried to ascertain how my university went in a few short years from zero to 14,000 clickers — a scenario that has probably played out on your campus, too.
The trail led not to IT, nor to the campus bookstore, nor to our teaching-excellence center, but to a handful of professors getting infrared clickers in pitches to adopt textbooks. In 2003, without classrooms wired for reception, these clickers were of little use. But marketers looked to early adopters to scurry to IT departments to make systems operational.
In our case, a 2006 report notes that infrared clickers were “peddled by different publishers,” requiring students to purchase multiple handsets, “an obvious financial burden.” The report cites additional burdens on our bookstore and IT department in stocking, managing, and equipping classrooms for multiple systems. Worse, often the entire infrastructure had to be moved to another classroom as a result of schedule changes from one semester to the next, adding more expense and creating scheduling snafus for facilities personnel. Because of those and other issues, the Iowa State report advocated for more-efficient radio-frequency clickers, which didn’t require registration fees or student records. Users then multiplied quickly throughout the university.
The story could have been worse. Our IT experts intervened early in the process, helping us save time and expense by adopting a more efficient TurningPoint system, for which the marketing strategy was to sell clickers rather than textbooks. Our teaching-excellence center helped professors use clickers more insightfully rather than simply for attendance and quizzes.
But I am still wary of clickers, and I asked professors in my unit if they were using them.
Jay Newell, who teaches advertising, consulted with his student advisory committee about using clickers in his large class. The students were against clickers, he observed: “One said that she and her friends would slow down lectures by inputting incorrect answers to poll questions. Another said that it was not unusual to have one student bring multiple clickers as a favor to friends in classes in which clicker responses were used to award credit.”
I was intrigued that Newell had consulted with students and had created an advisory committee, an idea recommended by the same center for excellence in learning and teaching whose e-mail message triggered this essay.
And that’s the moral of the story. Institutions have much to learn from students about the cost and effectiveness of technology. Chief information officers need to be consulted before departments invest in expensive for-profit consumer technologies. Professors need to realize that technology comes at a price, even when advertised as “free.” Finally, administrators need to double their efforts at cost containment, demanding assessment before investment, especially in schemes that bypass mandated accountability standards.
Otherwise business as usual will continue to disenfranchise our students, who will hold their debt-ridden futures in their clicking hands.
