Abstract:

It’s been five years and two months since Kahoot.org opened its early versions to the public, in September 2013. Nowadays more than 70 million active users each month reveal the empirical evidence of its success. Widely spread around the globe, primary and secondary levels of education profits from the advantages of the so called “gamification” and cell phones transforming into personal response devices. Nor the idea or the technology were new, but its community-free-contribution concept has been certainly the key. Controversy is served at the university level, where methodological revisions find rigid structures to overcome.The fact is that the global debate on the methodological renovation in higher education started long ago, in early 1990s,revived in the European Union with the implementation of the Bologna Plan, which reached the Spanish universities in the 2010-11. Although some of those tools are intended to improve learning processes,too often they may have been implemented with lack of planification and adequate alignment with the complete teaching process, feeding reluctancy against them. Therefore, there is still room for assessing methodological validity and results when implementing such innovations.

This paper assesses the use of Kahoot in econometrics as evaluation tool in two Spanish universities and 3 under graduates’ group of students in the region of Valencia. The innovation is presented through the classic scheme: “design-implementation-evaluation” and results are presented both quantitatively (through students’ grades) and qualitatively (through teachers and students’ assessment of the methodology). The paper also provides empirical evidence of differences in student’s results comparing the use of traditional evaluation tools versus “Kahoot”. This teaching innovation conspiracy ends with a self-critical conclusion section where future challenges are presented.

Keywords:

Teaching innovation, technology, econometrics, economics, active learning, higher education.