By Travis Loux (Saint Louis University)
Information
Student response systems (SRSs) are a popular way for instructors to engage students during class time and gain immediate feedback on students’ understanding of course concepts. Some limitations of many SRSs are the relatively limited number of formats questions and responses can take and the basic feedback they allow. In this presentation, I show how to use R Shiny and Google Forms and Sheets to create your own SRS-like tool. Having the ability to create their own SRS expands on the capabilities of basic SRSs, allowing instructors to ask more varied questions with deeper investigation, collect data for purposes other than feedback and assessment, and allow students to interact with their own data in real time, all with resulting visualizations tailored to the instructor’s vision. For example, these SRSs could look at bivariate distributions of responses based on student characteristics such as major, year in school, or previous coursework. Instructors can also use these tools to collect and report on results from individual student surveys, experiments, or simulations to motivate ideas such as random variation and sampling distributions. Finally, these Shiny apps can be hosted on an external server to allow students to interact with their and their classmates’ responses in real-time. This presentation will include a live example of a simple SRS used to collect results of in-class simulations. Other benefits and drawbacks of creating your own student response system will be discussed.