Poll Everywhere Blog

We chimed in on the interesting discussion on classroom clickers at http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/06/19/groveman, and I thought I’d cross-post here.

I want to outline our views from the perspective of a company who is trying to cut the cost of clickers by 10X. We’re already convinced of their pedagogical value, especially as the average mobile device starts to deliver a richer experience.

Mobile Phones as Clickers

SMS is ubiquitous on mobile phones, and works in extremely low signal areas (it is much more reliable and resilient than voice). Our tests of between 30 – 1000 replies show that response speed is quite acceptable to instructors, and a sent messages has never been dropped. But SMS costs money (addressed below), and there are valid concerns of accessibility that have been discussed in this thread. Our view (and that of Eric Mazur’s group at Harvard) is that the best solution is a flexible hybrid: Laptops, smartphones, dumbphones, and as a last resort, $30-$60 clickers.

Cost

Poll Everywhere is free for sections of less than 30 students and any K-12 Title I public school who has not made AYP. Our larger plans are not free so that we can dedicate our lives to this problem and also provide quality support. High quality on-demand support is one of open source’s challenges.

Our pricing comes out to $1.25 per student per semester, contrasted with the market prices for clickers that Frederica and Ira have provided. SMS messaging fees can be up to $.20 per message, but a surprisingly high percentage of Higher Ed students have text messaging plans that make the effective price $0.01 per message. The cost of SMS is a temporary weakness for two reasons: 1) US Carriers will soon follow Europe and Asia’s lead with FTEU SMS – “Free To End User”, making Poll Everywhere SMS responses free to students. 2) The rise of iPhones and web enabled smartphones has prompted us to create Poll4.com, which enables free SMS-like responses.

Who Should Pay

The “student pays for clickers” paradigm grew from one primary driver: device care and accountability. Harvard’s Graduate School of Education is using clickers this week for professional development workshops. By Monday end of day, 19 out of 100 clickers “walked off” accidentally in the pockets and purses of participants.

Derek and I have had the “analogies” discussion before. Graphing calculators maintain utility outside the classroom, as do textbooks (even given that the modern textbook publishing system is idiosyncratic and vexing). Therefore, a student may reasonably be asked to purchase those learning technologies. But imagine the absurdity of asking a student to pay a direct surcharge for taking a class that utilizes a digital projector or Scantron grading – it doesn’t make sense. Almost all students already own a phone.

Ease of Use and the Future

SMS and other cell phone methods will be simpler than clickers. Why? There are be no batteries for schools to replace. Students have positive confirmation and a record of what they submitted. Students don’t have to register their device online. Instructors can use SMS slides in PowerPoint that don’t require installing an add-in. By the end of this summer, we’ll support single-keypress responses.

Looking to the future, online clicker content communities will probably start to succeed, and potentially surpass publisher models (it’s an easier nut to crack than textbooks). Opt-in “anonymized” benchmarking could allow instructors to compare a part of their teaching efficacy to peer averages. As tired as appending this suffix is, I might dare call it Clickers2.0. Derek: We’ll be there ASAP. We’re passionate, growing, and sleeping very little (:

Until now, there was no way to identify who voted on your polls in Poll Everywhere. You could view summarized data, view detailed results and the time they were received, but you could not link an individual response to a specific person.

We know unique voter/respondent identification is important and so we’ve cooked up a way to get access to this information while simultaneously protecting a participant’s privacy.

How does one get a respondent’s phone number, name, or other identifying piece of information? Just ask them, and hopefully tell them why you need that information. The key to this is creating a free-text poll in Poll Everywhere asking an identifying question like, “What is your first and last name?” and allowing the audience to text in their response. Customers on a premium plan can then use the new Reports tab to tie together a respondent’s answers across multiple polls. In technical speak, this is cross-tab that correlates responses by phone number or session cookie. See the following screen shots:

…and the generated report…

With these exciting new capabilities, it is now possible to do some really great things:

• Build profiles of customers or attendees (anonymously or not)
• Grade students & take attendance
• Create short surveys
• Download results from many polls at once

These new features will be available to all premium subscription customers. We hope you enjoy the ability to get even more value out of your data.

Poll Everywhere was the first product to make mobile phone voting and SMS polling easy: You never have to call us or go through a lengthy sign-up process. We’re now introducing mobile web voting. This is a little different from our regular web voting where you distribute a private link to your poll. While you could always use a cell phone’s web browser to vote, traditional “web voting” was best suited for blog and email distribution. Now we have a streamlined interface for people to cast votes or send txt2screen using their mobile phone’s web browser: http://poll4.com

Some customers have asked about the costs of text messaging. Many people have a text messaging plan that costs less than $0.01 per message; those that don’t may pay between $0.05 and $0.20 per message. This can add up over time for frequent users. Mobile web voting uses a cell phone’s web browser to send messages directly to Poll Everywhere, effectively making the per-message cost free for iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and other smartphone users who have a data plan.

Just tell your audience or classroom to use their phone’s web browser and enter poll4.com (think, “Poll For” - we kept the address short because typing on a phone’s keyboard can be a pain). Poll4.com contains a box to submit a vote, just like sending a text message straight to our SMS short code. That’s it! It works for both free text and multiple choice polls.

To learn even more about this great new way to vote, go here.

We’re always improving. And you’re going to see a whole lot of improvements in the coming months.

We’ve made some enhancements to our user interface to allow for more apparent placement of key features and information. We also now offer a download link for PowerPoint 97-2003 files - and there’s a story about how that came about.

We saw a great video of some folks demoing Poll Everywhere at a conference. Everything went well and the audience was impressed. However, towards the end of their demo, they were looking at our PowerPoint functionality and ran into a snag because the computer they were using had an earlier version of PowerPoint. The manual instructions we provided for embedding polls into older versions of PowerPoint were 17 steps long! The presenters simply gave up on that portion of the demo. This really impacted us. We decided that despite the technical challenges, this is too much of a burden for our customers. We put other things on hold and focused on making it easy to download a PowerPoint 97-2003 (.PPT) version of the poll.

As for the user interface changes, we changed the tabbed interface and made the most important related functions a sub-menu.

Each poll now has an icon that indicates the type of poll.

You can now see your account users from the My Account tab.

We hope you find these changes useful. If you have more good ideas for us, let us know about them!

Hosting an audience choice award or talent show audience favorite is easy using Poll Everywhere. We were recently used to power the MIT 100K Business Plan Competition’s $10,000 Audience Choice Awards. You can watch the award ceremony (RealPlayer 220K or 56K), jump to 1:13:40 in, and see how Poll Everywhere was used for secure voting. The winning team was awarded a $10,000 audience choice prize.

Read about Poll Everywhere being used at the MIT Audience choice awards in the Boston Globe.

Or read about how Poll Everywhere won 3rd place in the mobile track.

We wanted to share some exciting news about Poll Everywhere. We were recently selected as one of the 35 semi-finalists out of 232 entrants for the MIT 100K Business Plan Competition, the “world leader among university entrepreneurship competitions”.

We’d tell you all about our strategy, but hey, that’s secret.

We have two really great mentors, Bill Frezza from Adams Capital Management and Mike Cavaretta from Morse, Barnes-Brown & Pendleton.

It’s nice to know somebody else sees potential in Brad besides Sean.

At Condense, we’re working hard for our customers on Poll Everywhere to continue to deliver great new features to make everyone more effective presenters, instructors, and religious leaders. While we can’t reveal everything we’re working on just yet, we did want to ask (nay, poll) our customers on things they really, really want to see in future iterations of the product. With that said, I welcome any of those reading our product blog to feel free to reach us at questions@polleverywere.com

We enjoy hearing from our customers, in particular some of the great stories you have to share, such as this quick one from Steve Dembo, Discovery Channel Education Network:

“You guys are kicking some major ass.  Those new pricing plans are dead on.  I’ve been opening up most of my presentations with a Poll from you guys lately :)  Today I’m a featured speaker at MACUL and will be using polls to open up two out of the three sessions.”

Thanks, Steve, we hope we continue to be able to help you get awesome responses from your audiences.

Meet the guys behind Poll Everywhere! For our fellow Chicagonians, Sean and I will be demoing Poll Everywhere tonight at TECH Cocktail 7. Please stop by and tell us what you hate or love about Poll Everywhere!

Here are a few photos from TECH Cocktail 5 where we officially launched Poll Everywhere into Beta.

Rod Monje with Hapax Labs is on the left and that’s me to the right.

Ah, a trip down memory lane. Does anybody remember the “party” look on our website?

We hope we see you there!

We are very sorry for some recent frustrations our customers have been having when trying to embed Poll Everywhere polls into PowerPoint slides. Customers have reported that after following the instructions for embedding a poll, they see only a blank screen when viewing the slideshow.  The reason for this is due to differing revisions of the Adobe Flash 9 Player. Adobe has released several fixes and revisions since they released the first version of the Adobe Flash 9 player. For polls in Poll Everywhere to display correctly, we now require v9.0.45.0 of the Adobe Flash player to be installed.

Additionally, what is frustrating about this is that versions of the player can be installed independently for Firefox and Internet Explorer. This is because Firefox has its own plug-in formats and Internet Explorer uses ActiveX-based plug-ins. Therefore, if you have the latest version reported in Firefox and are still scratching your head as to why the polls don’t work in PowerPoint, it’s because the ActiveX control is likely not up-to-date. Since PowerPoint relies on the ActiveX version of the Adobe Flash Player, it too must be updated.

If you want to see what version of the Adobe Flash plug-in you are currently using, go here: http://www.mediacollege.com/adobe/flash/player/version/show.html * Note that the version shown is the version installed for the plug-in of the current web browser you are using. Switch over to Internet Explorer to see the version installed for ActiveX.

If you want to update to the latest player from Adobe, go here: http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash * Note that the latest version is 9,0,115,0 as of the date/time of this blogpost.

Since we have issues with users viewing polls with outdated revisions of the Adobe Flash player, we have now enforced the version required into our poll. If you do not have the correct version of the plug-in installed, your Flash player will indicate that you need to upgrade. Once you upgrade, you’ll be able to view our polls correctly and, more importantly, be able to embed your polls into PowerPoint again. We hope this solves many of the headaches that some of our customers have been experiencing. We’re very sorry for any of the inconvenience.

If you haven’t noticed, Poll Everywhere has undergone some major changes. First and foremost is the new Poll management interface. While our old interface was working just fine we came to the realization that it would start crumbling when we started adding some of the exciting features that we have planned.

While our new user interface is the star of the show; we added other notable features including:

XML Results

Now you can download your Poll Everywhere results as XML! This allows even tighter integration between your applications and Poll Everywhere. For developers, this means you can now access results through our XML Poll API.

Time Zones

Did you ever wonder why the time stamp of your results didn’t seem quite right? We fixed that problem by adding time zones to Poll Everywhere. If you’re an existing user, you can click on “My Info” and change your time zone to your locale.

User Information Management

Ok, we should have had this from the start but we finally rolled it into Poll Everywhere.

Now you can change your password, email address, time zone, and other user information from the “My Info” tab.

While most of these features are small; we did a tremendous amount of plumbing work that is going to let us roll a lot of your feedback into our product. You will be able to see the fruits of this labor early in 2008.

We thank our early adopters for helping us make Poll Everywhere even better! To show our appreciation we have given 200 free votes to our existing accounts. Keep the feedback coming and Happy New Year!