QANDR INNOVATES LECTURING
Noterik’s user engagement tool QANDR is being used successfully at the Modul University to innovate this semester’s Bachelor course on New Media and E-Business Applications.
Using the word cloud of QANDR to collect and value insights
Every week, two MODUL assistant professors, Dr Lyndon Nixon and Dr Irem Önder, are using QANDR in parallel to engage two separate groups, with each around 60 students, in a playful manner, by querying them with polls on technology trends for business, asking them to position pointers on illustrations like the Gartner Hype Cycle, or collecting in real time student suggestions using an onscreen Word Cloud. The students make use of their mobile phones, tablets or laptops to be presented with calls for interaction and respond to them, with results shown real-time on the presentation screen.
“Using QANDR in the lectures has enabled me to more easily engage the students with the material they are learning about, ensuring all participants can be involved in a Joint activity and initiating interesting discussions in the Group. Something which previously proved very difficult in a lecture size of 50-60 students.”
Dr Lyndon Nixon, Assistant Professor New Media Technology at the MODUL University Vienna
A QANDR-empowered presentation is run much like a traditional Powerpoint presentation, in that a presenter shows a series of slides on a large screen using a remote control. However, the presentation is made more engaging by inserting interactive QANDR elements that will prompt the audience on their mobile phones to respond and collaborate in the presentation. Download an example QANDR presentation here.
Making a QANDR presentation is easy, a presenter will typically first make his or her normal slides using a classic tool like Powerpoint, Keynote, or Google Presentations, setting placeholders for interactive QANDR elements. Next, the presentation is uploaded using the QANDR dashboard and the presenter can subsequently add and define the various QANDR elements, and then the interactive presentation is ready to go.
The result is a simple but effective way to move away from the traditional one-way presentation paradigm towards a more engaging, collaborative and playful format to share information, make decisions or simply connect.
The large number of screens and the network traffic involved does provide a challenge for the QANDR application, but we have done some serious work on making QANDR scalable, and we are now reaping the rewards of our efforts. Obviously scalability is a crucial issue and our temporary hurdles are turning out to be stepping stones into the current situation whereby we are happy that QANDR can safely be used for audiences exceeding 100 people. However, we are not stopping there, and are working on optimising and testing the application to cater for larger crowds.
Noterik is continuously extending this concept, adding such things as gamification, profiling and statistics. QANDR can be used as an end product, or we can customise the concept, catering to your needs, such as branding, specific game elements, advertising, and more.