Introducing Electronic Voting Systems into the teaching of Mathematics

Across university campuses in the UK and elsewhere around the world, academic staff share similar concerns about the nature of contemporary student teaching and learning. These concerns include the fact that class sizes are larger, students may appear unmotivated in class and student passivity is perceived to be high. The larger class sizes have made it easier for students to become ‘anonymous’, and it is a challenge for shy students to participate in class by, for instance, responding verbally to a question. At Loughborough University, there has been a university-wide initiative to make lectures more interactive and get students more engaged by, amongst other things, introducing electronic voting systems (EVS) into lectures. Three staff from the Mathematics Education Centre (MEC), who mainly teach Engineering Mathematics to undergraduate students, have incorporated the use of EVS into their lectures…