Connecting with students online is easy when you’re doing something fun together. With iClicker, you can host online games that will help build a sense of community in your classroom while helping students master key concepts. Join iClicker training specialist Lindsey Thomas for a demonstration of the many different types of games you can play with your students during your live class sessions. We hope you join us with a cold beverage, a tasty snack, and will take the opportunity to participate as a “contestant” (aka student) using the iClicker student app.     Access the recording today! Watch Recording ... View more

Natalie Dougall, Faculty Advocate and iClicker Trainer, discusses best practices for onboarding your students with iClicker in a virtual classroom. She shows how you can incorporate iClicker into your course with minimal fuss, provides methods for getting students started with the iClicker student app, and shares some icebreaker activities that get students comfortable in your class and using iClicker.     Access the recording! Watch Recording ... View more

ON-DEMAND Instructors who had been using iClicker Classic in face-to-face classes can seamlessly transition to a virtual classroom without having to switch to new software. Senior Client Relationship Specialist Kelly Morrow shows iClicker Classic users how to enable the iClicker student app in their course settings and explains to students the steps to switch from physical clickers to the iClicker student web/mobile app.     Access the recording today! Watch Recording     Lindsey Thomas   Training and Documentation Manager   Kelly Morrow   Senior Client Relationship Specialist ... View more

ON-DEMAND iClicker Learning Solutions Specialist Alana Craig hosts a special iClicker Cloud instructor training webinar, which covers the nuts and bolts of setting up your iClicker Cloud account and course, downloading the software, and using the software for polling, quizzing, and attendance in a virtual classroom.     Access the recording today! Watch Recording ... View more

Exciting Summer/Fall 2019 Updates       Download Now   Manage distractions & mitigate multitasking in your classroom with new feature options, tailored to your technology choices. With the new iClicker Cloud 5.0 desktop software, all your in-class tools are in one place, which means more time for teaching. Getting started has never been this easy. See the onboarding improvements we’re making for Fall.     Classroom distractions have met their match. Meet iClicker Focus and Remote-Only courses.   Getting the most out of valuable face-to-face time can be challenging with busy students multitasking and the various distractions in play during class time. So we’re introducing a few new features to manage classroom distractions this year, with flexible technology options that allow you to choose what’s right for your classroom.     iClicker Focus Beta testing in Fall 2019, available January 2020 We know that many instructors would like the increased functionality that comes with a mobile student engagement app, but can have concerns about the use of mobile phones in the classroom. Enter iClicker Focus. With Focus, you can:   Reduce distractions & multitasking Gain insight into engagement in your class Promote student self-regulation behaviors   By Spring of 2020, instructors will have the option to designate any course to run as a “Focused Class” via their course settings and choose an allowed level of device usage. Focus provides insight for instructors and students around engagement in class via post-class reporting.     Remote-Only Courses Now live! Now in iClicker Cloud, instructors have the choice to specify that students only use iClicker remotes in their course. Our new Remote-Only mode allows instructors to disable the use of mobile devices in the classroom - students, however, will still have access to all iClicker Reef data in their app.       We’re rolling out the welcome mat. Whether instructor or student, we’ve improved our processes to ensure that everyone has a smooth start.   Instructor Onboarding Improvements—Coming in August   This fall, iClicker begins the process of rolling out onboarding systems improvements. Our sights are set on making it even easier to control enrollments to match LMS rosters and, in the near future, for instructors to create courses in iClicker Cloud. Keep your eyes peeled for updates!   Student Onboarding Improvements—Coming in Fall Students want easy, so we’re bringing it. We're improving the student onboarding experience, making it easier for students to sign up and get started in your course. ... View more

All Your Tools In One Place, More Time For Teaching Starting a class session and running activities using iClicker is now quicker, easier, and more intuitive.     Download Now           "What’s New in iClicker Cloud 5.0?" Learn More Engage your students using the desktop software for in-class activities. "The iClicker Cloud desktop software is your hub for in-class activities. Polling, quizzing, and attendance are streamlined into one, simplified toolbar. The desktop software contains all the you need to see your attendees, view participation, and grade your questions during class." Sign-in to the instructor website to access course data, anytime, anywhere. "Tasks commonly completed outside of class, such as roster management and grading past sessions, are now exclusively available at the instructor website. Links to these features are available within the desktop software." See iClicker Cloud 5.0 in Action     Try it out! Download the new iClicker Cloud 5.0     Download Now     Note: Students using iClicker Reef on a mobile device should update to the most recent version of the app for the best experience. Students using iPhones are strongly encouraged to update to version 5.2.3 of iClicker Reef (released Feb 28).   iClicker Cloud 5.0 is a new, separate version of the desktop software. All users will need to download the Full version of 5.0 (even if you have already installed iClicker Cloud 4.6 or the Beta version of 5.0).   iClicker Cloud 5.0 is a required update for Fall 2019 courses. You’ll have until mid-August to make the switch, so you can continue using your current version of iClicker Cloud (4.6) for your summer courses. ... View more

Enhanced Grade Sync | Release 4.6   Support for Blackboard and Canvas available this Fall with more coming soon.     Download Now   iClicker's easy-to-use multi-column grade sync experience provides instructors much more flexibility in setting up and syncing grades to their LMS. With this update, instructors will be able to sync grades for individual sessions or as a combined total, as well as sync session points rather than percentage.     Changes to the Instructor Website | Release 5.0 Version 5.0 will launch exciting changes to the iClicker Cloud instructor website that are currently available in preview mode, including the ability to view or edit session details and grades from the new Session History section. Some of the significant updates include: A simplified Gradebook will summarize grade totals only. Individual session details can still be accessed under Session History. New Class Sessions will allow you to switch between polls and quizzes in a single session without prompting students to re-join your session. Class sessions will also be integrated with taking Attendance so you will no longer need to launch separate Attendance sessions. Simply start your class and Attendance will automatically run.   All Activities... in One Session | Release 5.0 Polling, quizzing and attendance will soon be launched from a single iClicker Cloud session, making it easier for instructors to conduct in-class activities and for students to participate in polls, quizzes and attendance. Simple, Elegant Instructor Interface | Release 5.0 We are excited to be developing a more modern and streamlined experience for instructors in both the desktop software and the instructor website. Set to go live in January 2019, the new user interface will launch a fresh design and improvements to window management so instructors can focus less on our software and more on in-class activities.   Video Link : 2496   ... View more

Expanded Student Study Capabilities   NEW! Digital flashcards Students can easily create and curate flashcards around concepts they most need to practice and review to create a more focused, customized study experience, right from their mobile devices.       Download Now     Modernized and streamlined instructor options   NEW! Run and manage polling session and class presentation from mobile devices Instructors no longer have to be tethered to a desktop. Polling session and your presentation can be managed including monitoring and sharing results, tracking which students have responded and reviewing questions in the active polling session, all from a mobile device. PLEASE NOTE: The iClicker Cloud Mobile instructor app requires iClicker Cloud 4.2.2 or newer       PREVIEW! New elegant, modern instructor web experience Instructors can preview the modern, streamlined navigation and design of the iClicker web experience going live for Fall 2018. Instructors can get a jumpstart on familiarizing themselves with the new, easy-to-use experience prior to the mandatory update for Fall courses.     Enhanced instructor communication with iClicker product team   NEW! Give Feedback button When using the new modern, streamlined preview experience, instructors can provide direct feedback to the iClicker product team via the “Give Feedback” button in the left navigation bar making it even easier for instructors and technologists to provide insight and feedback on the iClicker experience.   Improved accessibility for students and instructors We continue to make steady progress to ensure that iClicker and its supporting applications are aligned to WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards as closely as possible. The March 2018 release includes numerous screen-reader and keyboard accessibility improvements to the instructor and student websites.   ... View more

Algorithms can help faculty discover and select open educational resources for a course, map the concepts covered in a particular text, generate assessment questions and more. By David Raths 10/04/17 The basic definition of machine learning is that it allows a computer to learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. One obvious example: the way a Netflix algorithm learns our TV-watching habits to make suggestions of other movies we might like. We come into contact with dozens of such machine-learning algorithms every day. Algorithms are even starting to make an impact on university campuses, taking on time-consuming tasks to ease faculty and administrator workloads. For example, RiteClass's predictive admissions platform uses machine learning to produce a "Prospective Student Fit Score" by ingesting data about current students and alumni. The Fit Score will determine how similar (or different) a prospective student is to current students and alumni, according to the company, helping institutions make data-driven admissions decisions. And in support of faculty members, several efforts are underway to use machine learning to analyze the contents of open educational resources (OER) for their fit in a particular course. Algorithm-Assisted Content California State University, Fresno has been urging its faculty members to seek out appropriate no- or low-cost course materials. The problem: Replacing costlier course material with appropriate OER content is time-consuming, said Bryan Berrett, director of the campus's Center for Faculty Excellence. To ease the process of selecting material, CSU-Fresno has been piloting an analytics solution from Intellus Learning, which has indexed more than 45 million online learning resources and can make recommendations of matching OER content. "If I am teaching an English course and I have a standard textbook, I can type the ISBN number into Intellus," explained Berrett. "Broken down by chapter, it will say here are all the OER resources that are available that match up with that content." The faculty member can then upload the resources directly into the course learning management system. Intellus says it can also index the millions of learning objects in use at an institution and provide real-time analytics on student usage. A similar homegrown effort at Penn State University has branched out into new directions, said Kyle Bowen, director of education technology services. PSU's BBookX takes a human-assisted computing approach to enable creation of open source textbooks. The technology uses algorithms to explore OER repositories and return relevant resources that can be combined, remixed and re-used to support learning goals. As instructors and students add materials to a book, BBookX learns and further refines the recommended material. Bowen explained that the work was inspired to some degree by more nefarious uses of machine learning. Looking at examples of researchers using algorithms to generate fake research papers begged the question: If you can do something like that to create fake research papers, could you use it to create real ones or real content? "What better problem to try to solve than looking at open content?" he said. "How could we simplify or expedite the process of generating a textbook or a textbook replacement?" In the process of training machines to search for appropriate content, the PSU researchers discovered that algorithms often surface content the faculty member may not have known about. Even if you are an expert in a topic area, there are still elements of the field you may not be as familiar with, and the algorithm is not biased by knowledge you already have. Describing the process of fine-tuning the algorithm, Bowen said it works less like a Google search and more like a Netflix recommendation. "With a Google search, you provide a term, and if you don't like the results you change your terms. Here you are changing how the machine is thinking about those terms," he explained. "You are telling it 'more like this, less like that,' and you keep iterating. It begins to focus on what you are looking for and what you mean by that term. It goes by the meaning the faculty member is trying to get to." Next Steps Although PSU is continuing its work on the OER textbook project, Bowen said, "What we uncovered was that using this machine learning approach to generate textbooks was potentially one of the least interesting things we could do with it." The institution's data scientists have moved into three other areas with the intent of taking on even more complex issues: 1) Prerequisite knowledge. In terms of sequencing how material is presented, machine learning might help instructors understand the prerequisite knowledge a person would need in order to understand a particular body of text. "We want to make sure that as you are coming into a class, the prerequisite knowledge has already been introduced," Bowen said. "You could do that yourself by charting out the concepts to see how they relate across the material. But in this case, the machine can more effectively construct concept maps and identify disconnects inside of them." 2) Generating assessment questions. Anybody who has crafted a multiple-choice midterm or final exam knows how challenging it is to make it representative of the work and create distractors to effectively assess understanding of a topic. PSU is working on a prototype algorithm that, given an OER chapter or a textbook, can suggest multiple-choice assessments. "This gets into an area of machine learning called adversarial learning, which comes out of security. It is how the computer identifies spam messages," Bowen said. Spam e-mails aren't real e-mails, although they are trying to look like they are — they are trying to exploit a vulnerability. With the creation of a spam filter, machine learning identifies pattern matches. "We want to do the opposite," he said. "We want to identify things that don't fit the pattern but look like they would. What are some things that might exploit gaps in someone's knowledge? What we have found is the machine creates really difficult multiple-choice tests. It shows very little mercy." PSU has not yet begun testing this solution with faculty. "It is important to explain that it is not the goal to replace what the person is doing, but rather to assist the faculty member," Bowen said. The goal would not be to have the machine generate multiple choice assessments on the fly, but to help a faculty member craft a multiple choice test that is representative of the material and help simplify the process of creating those tests, he added. The same is true with prerequisite knowledge. It is not to replace the work being done by faculty members, but to support them as they think about prerequisite knowledge. 3) Brainstorming with your computer. A third conceptual area PSU is working on is letting the computer help you brainstorm. "We all have friends who are really smart and who we go to to bounce ideas off of," Bowen said. Such a friend might ask if you have thought about other concepts. "You can do that with your computer," he explained. If you are thinking about a topic, the machine can say, "well based on that, have you thought about x?" It can help you brainstorm an activity and also form or prototype ideas and come out with a concept map or outline that helps you explore new areas. "So although the original algorithm was designed to generate texts, when we look at it, these three areas are potentially higher value problems to work on. We have moved away from our original research to look at how we can provide more targeted assistance on pain points in developing OER material." About the Author David Raths is a Philadelphia-based freelance writer focused on information technology. He writes regularly for several IT publications, including Healthcare Informatics and Government Technology.  ... View more

Clickers can dramatically improve your students’ engagement in the classroom. But, like all teaching tools, there are more and less effective ways of incorporating them into your class. This webinar will include a brief review of the motivations for using clickers, as well as practical guidelines for ensuring their success, including writing effective questions, facilitating student discussion and choosing a grading policy that minimizes stress for you and your students. Enrollment will be limited to ensure all participants have time to ask questions and share experiences. Watch Recording ... View more

Join Macmillan's Learning Science & Insights team as they share new research and insights on attendance. In this webinar, Dr. Kara McWilliams, Vice President, Impact Research, will discuss the learning science behind the benefits of taking class attendance and what trends sophisticated data mining reveal that have guided the development of new attendance features in iClicker. Dr. McWilliams will also share experimental research conducted with instructors and partner institutions into how using iClicker to take attendance improves important student outcomes like engagement and course performance. Watch Recording ... View more

Studies show that engaging students through activities, discussion and collaboration is more effective than traditional lecturing. iClicker is pleased to invite you to an Composition & Literature-specific webinar led by Blake Westerlund. Attend this webinar to learn key strategies, ideas and best practices as they relate to the English classroom! Watch Recording ... View more

Studies show that engaging students through activities, discussion and collaboration is more effective than traditional lecturing. iClicker is pleased to invite you to a Developmental English-specific webinar led by Natalie Dougall, Faculty Advocate and Trainer for iClicker. Attend this webinar to learn key strategies, ideas and best practices as they relate to the English classroom! Watch Recording ... View more

Studies show that engaging students through activities, discussion and collaboration is more effective than traditional lecturing. In this webinar, Brandon Tenn, PhD, Professor of Chemistry and Math at Merced College shares key strategies, ideas and best practices as they relate to the modern Chemistry classroom! Watch Recording ... View more

As seen on CNN, NBC and the Discovery Channel, rock star instructor Dr. Kate Biberdorf shares best practices on planning and executing active learning strategies that engage students for deeper learning.     Watch Recording ... View more