A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Classroom Clickers and the Cost of Technology”, is as much about adapting to new technologies, their costs, and their benefits to students, as it is about this audience response technology.  Having worked with faculty and IT staff to bring clicker technology to the SUNY Cortland classrooms several years ago, I was interested to learn that these audience-response systems have been around since the 1960’s when they were used in Hollywood to test unreleased movies and television shows. In the 1970’s they began to be used in business, and now they seem to be ubiquitous in educational settings.

At Cortland, we have standardized on the system offered by Turning Technologies, in part because a number of faculty in the Biology Department who were testing various systems found Turning Point to be the easiest to use, and the company representatives were willing to work with us. Our Biology faculty began using clicker technology in large lecture classes, both as an icebreaker (for example, polling students on their summer adventures) and as a means to determine the knowledge levels of the class. The anonymity and immediacy of responding via clicker technology seemed to be working, and the faculty were pleased with positive student reaction to this new technology. The downside of the technology (in addition to staff time required for training and class setup) was the cost: each student needed his/her own keypad to respond to the questions that were imbedded in PowerPoint presentations. Speaking to the general point of cost in the recent Chronicle article, Clark G. Ross, Vice president for Academic Affairs at Davidson College, said of technology in general: “If you can identify a benefit, you can justify the expense.”

We knew of the benefits but were reluctant to require students to pay for keypads, especially since they are charged a technology fee. We currently underwrite the costs of the clickers and lend them out to students. Students in classes who use the technology throughout the semester are given a keypad for a semester loan. Other faculty who are experimenting with the technology for one or two class sessions can borrow keypads from Classroom Media Services.  We have posted information about using the system on our TechInfo site.

With so many interactive technologies available, and with limited budgets, we are circumspect about what we support. Clicker technology has been popular, has pedagogical value, and has been worth our investment.