Poll Everywhere Blog

CNN had contacted us about the human side (among other things) of live audience polling and response using Poll Everywhere. CNN published that piece online today. You should read it to get a feel for where this industry is headed. We’re happy that we’re at the forefront of it and helping to push the technology forward.

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.

Watch the video below and see how at NYVideo.org the audience is in awe of the close tie for voting the best presenters for May at their conference. As the balance is shifted, you can hear a lot of excitement over who people think is going to win.

Alex Lindahl over at CollegeMogul.com “witnessed the excitement of Poll Everywhere, an inexpensive audience response system,” when he attended the MIT 100K Audience Choice Awards. It’s great to hear from Alex on his observations of how the audience became really engaged and excited to participate in the poll. Receiving just a small bit of feedback (even in the form of a vote on a poll) from individual people at an event captures people’s attention and keeps them really interested.

According to Alex, “they [the audience] wanted to know who would win the prize and if they had voted for the team that was everyone else’s favorite too. They were too eager to know and it drove them crazy. They loved it.”

Thanks, Alex, for volunteering to share your thoughts.

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.

Our customers asked and we’re happy to deliver.

Every plan, from Free through Max, can now set up free-text polls that allow your audience to express themselves freely. Instead of texting in their vote for a single option in a multiple choice poll, your audience can express themselves with words, phrases, their own names, questions for the presenter - anything you can say with a text message. The answers are displayed on the Poll Everywhere website, and will soon be available as live PowerPoint slides. Here are some potential uses:

• Use it as a tool to moderate anonymous questions from large audiences. You can display audience submissions to the presenter or moderator, allowing them to choose which issues to address.
• Use it as a brainstorming tool to allow everybody to contribute their ideas to the digital projector: “What should our new brand slogan be?”
• Allow students to text in short answers, much easier than with any clicker-based system: “What would be an effective Spanish book title for “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” in Latin America?”
• Create social artwork in public places like an sms2screen or “SMS graffiti” display.
• Use them as ice-breakers before a presentation on stage. Or ask a question that many people commonly answer incorrectly because of a popular myth, right before opening your speech or presentation which dispels it.

Multi-user accounts allow many users to share a single premium plan that is paid for by an organization. For example, a market research company may purchase 70,000 votes in our Max plan and make Poll Everywhere available to all their employees and clients. Entire universities or departments can purchase a plan for all their professors and staff. Each educator will have a separate user account that draws from the institution’s pool of purchased votes.

We’ve got more exciting stuff in the cooker. Visit us again soon!

Sean, Brad, & Jeff

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.