Clicker system fails in its basic function

The greatest concern that has emerged is that the clicker system is too complex to be technically supported on campus.

Alex Doherty

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

The adage, “If you play with fire, you're gonna get burned” seems to have recently struck the CPS Clicker system at Budig Hall. Last week, lecturer Nancy Holcroft was forced to assign 100 percent grades to every student taking a test in her Biology 100 class after the clicker system being used to administer the test failed to record the answers students were sending in. In this case it appears a problem arose with the lecturer's computer, though neither the company nor the University has identified a specific cause, eight school days after the incident.

Susan M. Zvacek, director of Instructional Development & Support, said that the clicker system is usually very reliable and her department had never before run into a problem such as last Monday’s. Although the system is mainly used for small quizzes, attendance or class interaction, IDS does not recommend using the system for “high-stakes testing situations.” It appears technology will continue to be integrated even more tightly into the class experience, but this raises a question: Is this integration necessarily positive or reliable?

eInstruction president Steve Kaye visited the campus Tuesday, meeting with professors and IT staff and finally assembling a company task force to investigate the problem. He assured that the University would be updated within 24 to 48 hours, though he offered no specific details as to the cause of the problem.

The greatest concern that has emerged is that the clicker system is too complex to be technically supported on campus, forcing the University to rely on a third-party company. It is positive that the company has taken steps to resolve these problems and communicated with University officials.

These good intentions still have not moved the University any closer to resolving the issue, and if professors are going to rely on this system to administer tests or other high-stakes usages, more high-level technical support needs to be available on campus.

Technology like the CPS clicker system provides some obvious benefits over traditional class interaction and test making methods, especially in large classes. It facilitates direct anonymous response to questions a professor might want to ask, and allows this information to be displayed instantly.

But convenience aside, the real question appears to be whether these platforms are ready for a test-taking environment, where time and grades are critical. Judging by the information available in researching the clicker system, it is not — at least in it’s current form.

Scantron surely has it’s share of issues as well, but the real issue is that as technology allows more advanced functions, it becomes more complex and therefore less reliable. Malfunctions with student or teacher hardware could cause a delay, forcing a reschedule or even a loss of all information, as happened last week.

Kaye said his company does thorough quality assurance testing on all its products and that a combination of unforeseen circumstances had converged to cause this problem. There are hundreds of different types of computers in use today, thousands of peripherals, countless configuration options and two major operating systems with five or more versions in use and all of this could cause problems. Basically, the clicker system has to be more complex in order to do what it does best and this is where unreliability comes from.

Currently then, the clicker system is thus inappropriate for testing situations. This is not to say that one day in the future this will not be possible. It will simply require more robust measures to address the complexity of the technology. According to Zaveck and Kaye, new training measures and software changes will be integrated to improve reliability.

The clicker system relies on complex technologies to offer what it does, meaning that in order for someone to fix it he or she will need a technical understanding of the system. Kaye said that eInstruction provides a comprehensive training program, but it mainly consists of how to setup a class’s roster or connect the equipment. As this circumstance has indicated, the clicker system is far more complex than this. When being used for testing, it is important it have a very high reliability rate. The system is complex and no one is available on campus that can provide high-level support.

If it’s the University’s goal to use the clickers for such important tasks, on-campus support and increased robustness in the clicker software would be required.

Alex Doherty for the Editorial Board

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