What Makes Audience Response Systems so Effective?

Around the world, the popularity of audience response systems is constantly growing. These systems were once used sparingly, and while many saw a lot of potential in them, the lack of technological advancements made them complicated to use effectively.

However, those days are long gone. Today, such systems are used heavily across schools, universities, live events, and conferences by consultants, corporations, medical training organizations, and market research companies.

But why exactly have these systems garnered such a great deal of popularity? Read on to find out!

1. An Audience Response System Encourages Active Learning

Learning is supposed to be a fun process. However, in conventional environments, education was often seen as boring, as most of the time, it was a one-way conversation where teachers/presenters would be the only ones speaking.

Such sessions of passive learning ended up being dull, and irrespective of whether they were held in schools, universities, or board room meetings, the participants would often leave dissatisfaction.

However, systems that allowed audiences to respond in real-time changed the game and paved the way for active learning to become famous.

These systems not only allowed educators and presenters to understand the opinions of their audiences but also encouraged them to participate.

This resulted in what is known as active learning, which is much more useful than passive learning in terms of how much audiences can retain from a particular class/conference/meeting.

2. Helps to Preserve Anonymity

In many classroom environments or corporate boardroom presentations, students, and participants who are shy and suffer from low confidence levels are terrified to speak out. They are often afraid that what they may have to say will be ridiculed by the others.

This was usually a reason why, in conventional settings, people often shy away from being responsive. As soon as the response involves talking, the others in a room immediately know who is speaking.

With audience response systems, the rules can be changed entirely. Such schemes allow participants to respond without their identities being revealed to the rest of the participants.

Thanks to this technology, even the shy ones can feel free to put forward their thoughts and opinions without any fear of being ridiculed.

3. Allows Comprehensive Assessment after Every Session

Be it a class in a school/university or a conference held by a market research company, the real-time responses of participants can be understood not just in real-time, but well after it as well.

This is of great help to professional educators and presenters, who are always keen to improve their skills. For example, an educator can analyze the inputs from one session to determine what type of questions should be put forward to students and participants in the next.

These post-session assessments can offer great insight into how individual students are learning and understanding concepts successfully for multi-session conferences and educational courses.

If the rate of learning and understanding is not very high, separate sessions can be held with participants who have trouble understanding. All in all, these systems are win-win for both educators/presenters and students/participants.

4. More Learning within Less Time

No matter how high the attention span of an individual is, long conference sessions or classroom sessions can be mentally draining, leading to a lack of focus and concentration as the sessions go on. This was another big problem in conventional learning environments.

Also, for educators/presenters to know individual opinions and doubts of participants would be time-consuming as every participant would take time to express their thoughts in their way.

However, thanks to wireless clickers and other essential audience response tools, modern-day educators/presenters can know exactly know the thoughts and opinions of participants in a matter of seconds.

While educators/presenters certainly have to work very hard and research and plan a lot behind the scenes to create blueprints for their sessions to ask the most vital questions, it ultimately pays off, as there is more learning within a shorter period.

5. Custom Solutions for Innovative Sessions

Educators/presenters always want to improve and innovate to make their sessions fun and engaging. However, with innovations in ideas, there is a need to be innovative in technologies as well.

Fortunately, professional consultants who are in charge of developing audience response technologies have the technical expertise to create custom solutions for unique demands.

As a result, no matter how innovative an idea is, an educator/presenter can always get in touch with a company that produces and manufactures wireless clickers and other audience response technologies that are ideally suited for their demands.

Ultimately, it can be said that as the demand for active learning grows, audience response technologies and systems can only get more popular. It is only a matter of time before such systems and technologies are embraced in many learning environments around the world.