Have you ever sat through a training presentation and thought that you learned more from staring out the window than from the instructor? Unfortunately, this scenario is common among adult learning presentations.
Many face to face training presentations are not optimized to maximize relevance and impact on audiences. The typical presentation consists of one or two presenters, usually having spent large amounts of time and effort developing the instructional design and content. All too frequently, this occurs without any assessment of learner needs, the existing skills in the learning population, or the results of previous training programs on the subject.
With an audience response system, learning professionals can use the system to quickly and easily prepare questionnaires and assessments to measure learning needs, reactions, and results before, during, and after learning interventions.
The following is a list of four ways to use an audience response system for adult learning.
1. Pre/Post Knowledge Assessment
You can use your audience response system to ask pre-assessment questions as you get things started. This will help to draw your audience into your material and identify how much they know (or don't know) about particular topics. Depending on the results, you can spend more or less time on each concept. This will create more memorable, powerful experiences that engage your audience.
Using an interactive response system, instructors can pose and tabulate test questions before, during, and after sessions. This allows for adjustment to the instructional design to include remediation loops if the group is failing to grasp a particular concept. It also provides for immediate tabulation and demonstration of results with pre-post comparisons.
2. Gamification
Gamification is the use of game playing elements to draw attendees more deeply into your presentation. Each person attending the meeting participates using audience response keypads or their own phone, computer, or tablet. Responses are tracked in real time to game questions posed by presenters. The audience response system software tabulates the data from individuals and teams and immediately displays scoreboards with comparative results.
Competition naturally encourages participation and engagement with your subject material. Develop one interactive game question for each of the most important topics in your presentation. Then, use your audience response system to play a round of the game competition every 10 to 20 minutes as your presentation unfolds. Pose two or three questions in each round and show a scoreboard with individual or team results. Your audience will enjoy the experience and attentiveness will soar.
3. Surveys
If you’ve ever wanted to know what your audience was thinking - either about a particular subject matter or if they favored or disliked a topic - your audience response system can solve this with 95% plus participation rates. In reality, your attendees are just as curious as you are about the opinions and real world experience of people in the room.
Use your ARS to poll the audience on a series of survey questions. You will be able to learn what audience members think about each topic in seconds. You can identify how often members of the audience are experiencing problems or issues related to your subject matter. You can then use your response system to foster discussions and benchmark best practice solutions from real world experience. An audience polling system gives you a host of opportunities to tap the wisdom of the people in the room. Your attendees will engage with one another and your material more effectively.
4.Case Studies
Incorporate real-life case study questions to stimulate critical thinking. This will help ignite the creativity of your attendees; nothing gets an audience more engaged than thinking about their own solutions to a practical problem. Using an ARS will give audience members the option to vote for the best proposed solution to the case. Certain audience response systems are even capable of utilizing a priority ranking system. They can also see how others would solve the problem. Put results on screen and ask participants to defend their selections. Discussion will expand and understanding will increase. This can be very beneficial when those in the audience participate in a technique called “peer instruction” where the audience is divided into teams of three or four people to discuss and solve the case.
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