Abstract:

This paper shows the practical experience of the group "Teaching Innovation and Good Practices" (TIGP) of the University of Almeria (Spain) in the development and use of a new clickers (Classroom Response Systems) tool based on a messaging application. Since all the university students have smart mobile phone, the aim is to use this tools to support university teaching as an interactive response system. The analysis in different university degrees shows a robust tool to learn how to improve in our teaching methodologies.

The objectives of the TIGP group to carry out this work are summarized as follows:
- Design, implement and optimize a free software clickers system that, making use of messaging applications, allows communication between teachers and students through mobile devices.
- Design activities and tasks so that the teacher can improve teaching quality through the use of clickers.
- Investigate the advantages and disadvantages of clickers at the university context, establishing guidelines for the design of activities that make use of these technological tools, and knowing the perception that teachers and students have about them.
- Compare the effectiveness in the use of clickers in subjects of different degrees, as well as in contexts where traditional and active methodologies (cooperative learning, flipped classroom, project based learning, etc.) are used.
- Design assessment systems according to these new teaching strategies, so that students opinions and assessments could be taken into account.

The methodology that has been followed during the development of activities of this teaching group has consisted in four different phases:
Phase 1: In a first phase, software has been designed and implemented using a bot based on Telegram. Telegram code is open source, so anyone who wants it can access it. A bot is an automated chat where we can interact in a simple way in order to create surveys of different types (survey, quiz, multi-choice) that will be sent to our students via Telegram. Users can interact with bots by sending them messages, commands and inline requests. To control the bots, HTTPS requests to the bot API are used.

The implemented options are:
1) Quiz: Free text question,
2) Multi: Possibility of asking with multiple answers.
3) Yes / No: Question with affirmative or negative answer.
4) Survey: Question where is valued from 0 to 10. All the options allow request a clarification to the students, so that they can expose their reasoning.

Phase 2: Once professors and students have the technological means to communicate, and know the procedures to do it, professors have carried out their teaching activity, either with traditional methodologies or active methodologies, so that at certain moments of face-to-face sessions, they have raised some questions or they have solicited opinions from students.

Phase 3: After receiving the answers from the students, the teachers have carried out an evaluation of the teaching-learning process. A series of reports and rubrics have been proposed where the advantages and disadvantages of using clickers in each context have been determined identifying possible solutions to problems.

The analysis of the results shows that this clickers tool is very versatile and offers information to improve the teaching process. Students also become more motivated by being an anonymous process.

Keywords:

Clickers, free software, Telegram.