By incorporating an audience response system (ARS) into your presentation, you are already well on your way to engaging your audience. However, knowing some proven techniques on how to creatively apply an audience response system will turn your presentation into a memorable experience. Audience members will value the way that you combine learning concepts with active audience participation exercises.
The team at Option Technologies has pooled our experience in applying interative tools to identify a list of the top five ways to use an audience response system for adult learning. We hope you will be able to incorporate some of these techniques with your ARS to improve the effectiveness of your presentations:
1. Pre/Post Knowledge Assessment
The best way to deliver a more powerful presentation is to take time to really understand your audience. Asking questions at the beginning of your presentation to identify knowledge levels of attendees and their interest in your planned topics will give you important insight. You'll be able to adjust the content and timeline of your presentation to better meet their needs.
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.
Display some of assessment results to foster discussion. Ask the audience why they answered as they did. This will help boost attentiveness and retention. Attendees will be more likely to improve their scores on post-meeting assessments and apply what they have learned; Generating valuable metrics for your next presentation.
2. Team Building Exercise
You can use your ARS to promote interaction amongst your audience. This will improve learning and foster new relationships. Ask some demographic questions to identify who's in the room. "How long have you been working in this field?" "How often do you see this type of problem or situation?" This helps attendees to appreciate how they fit with their peers in the session.
Follow-up with some questions to identify audience sub-groups with particular learning needs or interests. Divide the audience into these sub-groups for discusson or problem solving exercises. Attendees will find meaningful solutions working with their peers and will establish new relationships that will last long after your presentation.
What better way to connect your audience members with each other than having them participate in a little competition. Splitting your audience into two or more different teams - to compete against each other over a series of questions - is another creative way to use your audience response system during your presentation. This is not only a proven exercise that helps audience members retain information, but it also helps build communication and potential networking opportunities between them.
3. Gamification
Gamification is the use of game playing elements to draw attendees more deeply into your presentaton. 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.
There are many possibilities for gamification using your audience polling system. Use challenges, case studies, table teams and other configurations along with rewards to drive learning and mastery of key concepts or skills. By thinking creatively, you can incorporate a web or Powerpoint based learning game into your presentation - in ways that will be both stimulating and effective. You can find more information and tips on how to incorporate gamification into your presentation in some of our past posts: Why Should I Gamify? and Adding Gamification to Your Presentation.
4. Surveys
If you’ve ever wished you could know what your audience was thinking - either about a particular subject matter or if they favored or disliked a topic - consider your wish granted; And you don’t even have to summon a magical genie. Your audience response system can solve the questions to your answers with 95% plus participation rates. The good news is that 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 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.
5. 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.
To find out more about how you can use your Audience Response System more effectively, click the learn more button below.
