I just had what my son would describe as an ‘Epic Fail’ clicker session
We wanted people to vote for a range of options, 9 in all. If they thought all 9 were important they could vote for all 9.
(I can hear the people with clicker experience ‘oh no, not 9 options. You poor fool’).
We were dealing with adults, not undergrads, the instructions were clear and repeated 3 times, they had had three prior attempts.
So anyway, we got results that were frankly bizarre. We did a show of hands to check a couple of options, and the clicker results were way out.
The problem with clickers is that people can’t see an individual record of what they have selected. People were clicking the same number more than once, in effect making more than 9 selections. As a consequence their last 1 or 2 choices weren’t being recorded.
This was compounded by (me) not turning on the ‘vote once’ option. Which meant that the errors where recorded in the results.
It’s possible that some of these aberrations weren’t errors but attempts to stack votes for their preferred option (many of the participants had a vested interest in the results). We had people who voted 7 times but only selected 2 options.
We initially thought it was a technical error – too many people voting for too many options at the same time overwhelming the receiver. But no, it was user error.
We were using the wrong tool.
For single responses clickers are fine. If you want to have multiple responses you need a system where people can see the responses they are making- an online survey (Moodle, Qualtrics, Survey Monkey, Google Forms). This means you need a computer lab, or everyone needs a wireless device.
In the end we used paper.
If you are using paper you can streamline the process using an auto-marking software package like Remark Office. We have a few licences and it works quite well.