Developing and facilitating a creative teaching culture using an Electronic Voting System

At the beginning of the 2008/2009 academic year and led by the e-Learning team, the University of Bath embarked on a pilot of an Electronic Voting System (EVS). With the intention of improving the assessment and feedback cycle or loop (Sadler, 1989; Nicol and MacFarlane-Dick, 2006), the EVS has been embraced by a number of lecturers to support and enhance their face-to-face teaching.
During the pilot year, there is clear evidence of a sustained change in the way that some individuals teach when they use the technology. The key questions being addressed within this poster are:
* How has the use of EVS led to lecturers being more creative in the ways that they teach? * How is this being rewarded through increased student engagement and positive feedback? * In what ways has any good practice been effectively disseminated to impact on other lecturers?
We detail four short case studies about how the EVS has been used by lecturers to further develop e-Learning practice within academic departments. As well as enhanced feedback to students, a key feature of these studies are where the EVS has been used to encourage both increased participation and deeper learning by students, and to facilitate in-class debate and discussion. The likely longer term success of this institutional implementation will be illustrated through applying the 4-E Model (Collis, Peters and Pals, 2001). We also consider how use of the EVS can result in increased innovations in teaching methods, and whether this might lead to a longer term change in academic practice.