Rob Keyzers

=GoSoapBox=

Dr Rob Keyzers School of Chemical and Physical Sciences
Rob Keyzers has used GoSoapBox, which is a classroom response system for engaging with students in large lecture classes through polling and discussion questions, as a way to interact with his students during large lectures for several years. Rob finds it useful for several reasons, such as being able to check student understanding, quickly correct misconceptions and to engage with students who would otherwise be too uncomfortable to speak out.

"I used to think that I was technologically up with the play, but realised I was a ludite. With students these days, we need to keep up with the play.  With GoSoapBox it's really easy -- its intuitive to use.  I think we'd be doing the students a disservice if we didn't use something like this"

Rob was one of the early adopters of GoSoapBox, first using it in a run of four first year lectures in T2 2014. He has since used it all of his first year classes, which each have around 100 students, and also uses it in his bigger second year classes, those with around 50 students. While Rob does not use GoSoapBox in his third and fourth year classes, there is no fundamental reason why he couldn't. Before he started using GoSoapBox, Rob had been using 'clickers', hand-held polling devices which are distributed to students during the lecture. Rob found that using GoSoapBox was similar to using the clickers, though it tended to be more reliable and offered some additional features that he found extremely useful.

GoSoapBox is a web-based tool, which means that students use the web browser on their own devices to connect to the polling session. Initially, Rob was concerned that equity issues could mean that not all students would have devices to use. While Rob acknowledges that this may still be the case for some students, he has found that the numbers of those with the right devices is high enough that this is no longer a good excuse for not using a tool like this. It is particularly helpful to move away from the idea that each student needs to make their own response, and instead have students without devices working together with those that do.

The main features of GoSoapBox are polls, quizzes, and discussion/question tools. Initially, Rob wanted the ability to do on-the-fly polling to find out if he was reaching students. These polls get instantaneous feedback about whether the material is making sense, and can show if you need to adapt the rest of the lecture to accommodate that feedback and to head off misconceptions. The polls also allow the students to practice the concepts that they have just been taught, helping to reinforce their learning, and shows the students where they are with their understanding, which they appreciate.

Rob has continually tweaked and updated the way he uses GoSoapBox. In his first time using it, Rob made the mistake of setting up quizzes rather than polls. The quiz feature does not display the whole class responses in real time as polls do, which means that it did not work as Rob wanted. Despite the mishaps, Rob received positive feedback from students in that class, who said that they could see the value of GSB, had it worked correctly. Other changes he has made include the way he puts the polls into GSB. Initially, he put all of the question detail and images into GSB, but has since found it more efficient to keep most of the detail in his Powerpoint slides. After some trial and error, Rob has found the right method of easily swapping between the poll results and his Powerpoint slides. He has also added breaks and pauses for checking student responses into his lectures.

Crucially, Rob has discovered that the feature that allows students to anonymously ask questions is very powerful, especially at first year level. This question feature (called 'Social Q & A') allows students to ask questions without feeling uncomfortable or scared and enables the more shy students to have a voice. GoSoapBox has a 'like' feature for the questions, which means that other students can indicate what they find important, helping Rob to know what is important to them. Rob has found that around half the time, other students in the class respond to questions, usually with the correct answers, which is a great example of peer-to-peer instruction and helps those who answer questions learn better. In these cases, Rob likes to acknowledge both the right answer and the student who gave it.

In Rob's case, it is hard to tell if there has been an impact on student grades, as he previously had been using clickers which have a similar function. When Rob first started using GoSoapBox, the students were very excited to use it. Now that it is becoming more widely used across the university, the novelty has worn off and it has become an expected part of the lecture experience for the students. For Rob personally, there has been a huge benefit to his enjoyment of teaching, allowing more interactions with the students in the larger classrooms. Student feedback has been either positive or neutral, with no negative feedback thus far. Rob considers it important to adapt to changing student expectations, and finds GoSoapBox useful for forcing him to think more digitally.