KlickerUZH v3.0: Concept and Request for Feedback

rschlaefli · November 15, 2022, 4:59pm

Dear KlickerUZH community,

Over the past few years since our relaunch as an open-source project in 2018, the KlickerUZH and its usage as an interaction tool has steadily grown both in- and outside the University of Zurich. As part of our ongoing project on improving classroom interaction and the digital skills of lecturers, we are currently working on a complete redesign of the KlickerUZH, have scheduled a new release, and are seeking your feedback on our new ideas and functionalities. For an overview of our current development project, see Development | KlickerUZH.

Summary of KlickerUZH v3.0

Based on collected feedback and ideas, as well as best practices in teaching, we have implemented a set of new concepts in the next version of the KlickerUZH. We are currently testing these concepts and have already received primarily positive feedback from our students. To gather feedback from you, our users, before we finalize and release these features, the new concepts will be described in detail in several upcoming community posts. You are more than welcome to give us your opinion on any of the topics that interest you, and we thank you in advance for any feedback that you provide.

For a primarily visual overview of the concept and first use cases and evaluations, see KlickerUZH Conference Slides from Online Educa 2022. More in-depth explanations of the concepts can be found in the following text.

We will look at the following concepts and functionalities in more detail:

Survey on Interaction and Gamification: Many of our developments and use cases are based on the information gathered in user interviews and surveys.
Gamified Live Quizzes: besides the traditional Live Quiz and Live Q&A/Real-Time Feedback, we now support gamified Live Quizzes that allow students to participate in a live competition.
Asynchronous Learning Scenarios: in addition to the synchronous classroom interaction setting (I.e., the interactions during a live lecture), we now provide additional methods to interact with students outside of class:
- Microlearning sessions allow students to practice a set of questions each week in a time-restricted manner (e.g., every Wednesday). These sessions are available on the new KlickerUZH smartphone application.
- Learning Elements can be embedded directly in e-Learning courses and allow students to repeat learning contents on-the-go using our smartphone application. We are also looking into supporting methods like spaced repetition on these learning elements.
- Group Activities allow students to collaborate on a set of questions and foster collaboration through distributed information. Each participant in a group receives only part of the clues necessary to answer a question, encouraging an exchange on the topic between participants. See Coming Soon - KlickerUZH v3.0: Group Activities and Collaboration.
PowerPoint Integration.: The PowerPoint Add-in allows you to start and control sessions and to embed the evaluation view of questions directly on slides.
Courses and Challenge: all the individual activities contribute toward a course-level “challenge” and leaderboard that lecturers can embed in their teaching (e.g., by awarding participants at specific points in time). See Coming Soon - Use Case: Experiences in a Gamified First-Semester Course and further use case and pilot descriptions.
Analytics: at a later stage of the project, we will also introduce more advanced possibilities regarding the analysis of interactions and learning progress of participants. More on these concepts will be published at a later stage.
Evaluation of Student Surveys on Interaction and Gamification
Sustainability and Funding of the KlickerUZH Project

KlickerUZH v3.0 Beta in February 2023

If you are interested in participating in the UZH beta test throughout the spring term 2023, please have a look at the sign-up thread (Sign-up for the KlickerUZH v3.0 UZH Beta).

The new KlickerUZH v3.0 will be released in February 2023 as a beta version for all users at the University of Zurich, with the current KlickerUZH being available for everyone until the end of September 2023 (specific information on the transition will be announced separately). The beta label signifies that the documentation and design of the new KlickerUZH might not be finalized and that not all features of the current KlickerUZH might have been transferred yet. However, all features that are offered should be usable in a large-scale live lecture setting, as we are already applying these features in a first-year course with 700 students. A migration from the current version to the new KlickerUZH will be possible and will be required for continued usage of the KlickerUZH during the fall term 2023.

The “Vanilla” KlickerUZH Experience

Besides all the above, it is still possible to create sessions without gamified interactions or linking them to a course. All the new functionalities and interaction modalities are optional. Students are still completely anonymous throughout their entire journey. Students in a course can choose whether their score should be tracked on a course-level leaderboard, or whether they would like to audit the activities without participating in challenges and leaderboards.

Public Roadmap

By publishing our concepts for the future of KlickerUZH, we hope to involve you directly in the development process and want to address your feedback and concerns as part of the upcoming releases (v3.0 and following). Our roadmap on Roadmap | KlickerUZH will always show a current state of our ongoing developments.

The KlickerUZH v3.0 will include many often-requested improvements like:

The above will lay the foundations for future work on sharing questions and other elements. These “small” improvements will be included in the detailed release post once we publish the KlickerUZH v3.0.

Best regards,

Team KlickerUZH

rschlaefli · November 15, 2022, 5:00pm