KlickerUZH v3.0: Release Information

rschlaefli · July 14, 2023, 10:00pm

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 efforts on improving classroom interaction and the digital skills of lecturers, we are currently working on a complete redesign of the KlickerUZH.

The new version, KlickerUZH v3.0, has been released (see https://www.klicker.uzh.ch). The old version (KlickerUZH v2.0) is no longer supported for continued use and will be shut down without further notice.

This post will summarize the new functionalities included in the release, as well as provide you with further information on the release procedures, timeline, and data migration:

What’s New

An overview of the new concepts and functionalities, as well as the didactical use cases, has been provided in our talk at the UZH Teaching Inspiration Week. A recording of the talk (in German) can be found here:

The following overview shows the complete range of functionalities of the KlickerUZH v3.0 as well as the new highlights (marked as new):

The most important changes and additions when compared to the KlickerUZH v2.0 are the following:

Gamified Live Quizzes: besides the traditional Live Quiz, 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:
- Groups and Group Activities allow students to compete in the gamified course as a team and to collaborate on a set of questions 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.
- Microlearning allow students to practice a set of questions each week in a time-restricted manner (e.g., every Wednesday). These sessions are available online and in the new KlickerUZH smartphone application. When using the app, students can decide to receive push notifications when a new microlearning is available.
- Practice Quizzes can be embedded directly in e-Learning courses (e.g., on OLAT) and allow students to repeat learning contents on-the-go, either online or using our smartphone application.
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). Students can collect points, achievements, and levels throughout their studies and in all of the courses they participate in.
The KlickerUZH v3.0 will also include many often-requested improvements like:
- Running Sessions in Parallel
- Support for KPRIM questions
- Rich-text editor for SC/MC options
- Embedded Images
- Managing tags
- And many more…

For more information, see Core Concepts | KlickerUZH on our documentation page.

Besides all the above, it is still possible to create sessions without gamified interactions or linking to a course. All the new functionalities and interaction modalities are optional. Students can remain completely anonymous throughout their entire journey. Students who decide to join a course can still 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.

Use Cases

The initial use cases as described here have been published on KlickerUZH. We are still continuing to evaluate the concepts and will update the content regularly. More use cases will be added alongside the matching concepts in KlickerUZH.

Which of the previously described concepts makes sense in your specific course and teaching scenario? To support you in deciding and to provide inspiration for potential applications, we are working on and will be publishing several use cases throughout this summer, including background information on how we implemented various concepts in our own lectures.

The visualization above showcases the diversity of how the KlickerUZH v3.0 can be applied, depending on your goals (strengthen interaction or foster engagement) and type of scenario (synchronous or asynchronous). Depending on the goal and type of scenario, the KlickerUZH v3.0 offers other matching functionalities. Each use case will describe background, possible teaching scenarios, didactic goals, initial evaluation results, limitations and the technical implementation within the KlickerUZH v3.0.

The following use cases have been published:

The use cases will be continuously extended with new findings and new use cases will be added as the KlickerUZH project evolves.

Release Timeline

The new KlickerUZH v3.0 has been released. For further information, refer to our landing page on https://www.klicker.uzh.ch and the documentation as available on the site.

The new KlickerUZH v3.0 has been released for all users. KlickerUZH v2.0 is no longer available. A migration from KlickerUZH v2.0 to the new KlickerUZH v3.0 will be available until the end of March 2024. The migration to the new version v3.0 is straightforward, but will require access on your side to the e-mail inbox used in KlickerUZH v2.0.

Survey on Learning Analytics and AI

In our latest survey, we would like to get your feedback on the current version of KlickerUZH and find out what would be valuable for you to further improve future versions of the platform.

In particular, this concerns the following two areas of future development:

Learning analytics: Learning analytics involve collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data on students’ learning behavior to enhance and optimize teaching processes, offering personalized learning experiences, implementing more effective teaching methods, and identifying early-stage difficulties. Learning analytics will be the focus of our next project phase.

AI in education: AI in education uses machine learning and algorithms to improve learning methods, streamline administrative tasks for teachers and improve the quality of teaching and the overall student experience. As with many other tools, AI could also have a high impact on the use of KlickerUZH, but we need your feedback to support you in the best way possible.

Click here to take part in the survey.

Log-in with Switch EduID

Edu-ID is now required to create a new account on https://manage.klicker.uzh.ch. Delegated log-in can be set-up on KlickerUZH. More documentation for this functionality will be coming soon.

Starting with the KlickerUZH v3.0, you will need to log in with a Switch EduID (the future successor to SwitchAAI, see Switch edu-ID | Switch). The KlickerUZH-specific log-in using username and password will no longer be supported, and your account will be converted to use Switch EduID during the migration process from v2.0 to v3.0.

Log-in with EduID makes the KlickerUZH v3.0 safer (e.g., using optional multifactor authentication) and more interoperable (as, e.g., UZH now requires all users to use EduID). An EduID can be created by anyone, even outside of Switzerland, and by just using a personal email address (see https://eduid.ch).

A delegated access mechanism (i.e., allowing an EduID account holder to share access keys with other people) will ensure that sharing of accounts in a lecture setting (e.g., with teaching assistants) remains possible.

Data Privacy and Policy Updates

Our new privacy policy and terms of use have been implemented at Privacy policy | KlickerUZH and Terms of Service | KlickerUZH. You will be required to accept these conditions to use KlickerUZH v3.0. You as lecturers are also responsible to inform your participants about any further analysis you might perform on data collected using and provided to you by KlickerUZH (e.g., learning analytics).

With KlickerUZH v3.0, students will be able to create a KlickerUZH account with an e-mail, pseudonym, and password to participate in gamified activities and to be able to use the KlickerUZH mobile application throughout their studies. To do so, they will need to accept the new KlickerUZH terms and conditions and privacy policy on account creation, which will be published alongside the release (with only minimal updates regarding you as lecturers).

It is crucial to us that it will always be possible to participate anonymously (through a direct URL) in all activities except group formation and group challenges. Using the KlickerUZH app (e.g., on smartphones) will require a student log-in, as we need to be able to identify and associate students with the courses they partake in throughout their studies.

You as lecturers will be able to see the e-mail addresses of students in your courses for the purposes of the gamification of activities (e.g., on the leaderboard to be able to distribute awards) and to prevent/block misbehavior (e.g., to block students with unfitting usernames or responses). You will not be able to see the exact responses given by your students, only the aggregate information like the points they collect as part of their combined activities.

To facilitate the above additions from a privacy perspective, students will need to accept our terms upon joining their first course using KlickerUZH v3.0. We will state the above additions as transparently as possible, including what lecturers can and cannot see, and how the data is being processed.

Catalyst: Sustainable Funding of the Open-Source Project

An initial website describing this idea is available at https://www.klicker.uzh.ch/catalyst. All users associated with the University of Zurich (@uzh.ch and @usz.ch) automatically get access to the full set of features.

We have moved this topic to a separate thread for discussion, inputs, and questions at KlickerUZH v3.0: Sustainability of the KlickerUZH Open-Source Project.

Mobile Applications

Google Play Store
KlickerUZH v3.0 has been published at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.uzh.bf.klicker.pwa

Apple App Store
Work in Progress

In addition to being accessible via the web browser, we aim to publish dedicated applications of the KlickerUZH v3.0 targeted at both students and lecturers in the Google Play and Apple App Stores (and, potentially, the Microsoft Store). Due to the sometimes-lengthy set-up and review process, we plan to have these apps released any time after the public release and, if possible, before the start of the fall term 2023.

All the features of KlickerUZH v3.0 will still be usable using a standard web browser (with links like /join/shortname) without installing the dedicated apps. The optional apps and optional student log-in will, however, make the KlickerUZH much easier to access for students and lecturers alike and allow students to have all of their courses using KlickerUZH in a single place.

OLAT Integration

The KlickerUZH v3.0 can be integrated with Learning Management Systems through the LTI-Standard. To showcase this integration, we have created a demo course in the LMS of the University of Zurich, OLAT: OLAT - lms.uzh.ch. Detailed documentation will be coming soon. If you have a use case for the integration and teach at UZH, feel free to reach out to us.

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). Please see our roadmap on the current state of ongoing developments: Roadmap | KlickerUZH

Analytics and Reflection : at a later stage of the project, starting in the fall term 2023, we will also investigate more advanced possibilities regarding the analysis of interactions and learning progress of participants (“learning analytics”). This allows lecturers to aggregate information about the learning progress of their courses, as well as students to reflect on their progress.
PowerPoint Integration: we have also been working on a PowerPoint integration, which will allow you to embed evaluation results within your slides, as well as to control your live session from the PowerPoint sidebar. The publishing and approval process of this integration is still ongoing, and we are not yet able to communicate a specific timeline.
We are also planning to investigate the potentials of collaborative question creation (whereby students can collaborate on their own questions) and generative AI (e.g., to generate question options or content, or to provide automated feedback) in later releases.

Support

As previously mentioned, we provide support for all users on a best effort basis through this community platform. You can log-in using the same log-in as used for the KlickerUZH. For users at UZH and partner institutions (Catalyst program), we additionally provide support through our klicker@bf.uzh.ch address. If you are not part of UZH or the catalyst program and contact us via e-mail, we reserve the right to redirect you to the community.