Creating Interactive Workshops with Wooclap

Introduction

The past 18 months has forced educators to operate in a world where to face-to-face instruction has been nearly impossible. Since the launch of my testing program’s in-person teacher training workshops in 2016, we have been hosting educators from around the globe yearly for a train-the-trainer style workshop. During this week-long training, participants take part in different workshop modules and then receive feedback as they practice facilitating pieces of the workshop. Our in-person training was canceled for 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but as travel and in-person events are slowly returning, we still see a strong need for the development of online and hybrid workshop options. It is a significant challenge for many educators to travel to Princeton, NJ to attend a workshop for an entire week and in our commitment to accessibility and equity, we would like to be able to extend the opportunity to more participants around the world. We have identified Wooclap as a platform that will allow us to do this in a way that will allow us to keep participants engaged with the content throughout the workshop as well as connected to other participants.

What is Wooclap?

Wooclap is an audience response system (ARS) that can be used in conjunction with a presentation or event given in either an in-person, online, or hybrid format. An audie response system (ARS) allows learners to actively participate in the event by responding to multiple choice polls, open-ended questions, and other feedback tools. There are many audience response systems available such as Kahoot, Quizlet, and Votar, but these systems mainly focus on eliciting answers to multiple choice questions (Grzych & Schraen-Maschke, 2019; Oulaich, 2019). Wooclap offers 16 ways in which the presenter can interact with participants including brainstorming, word clouds, matching, rating, and locating areas on an image (Oliveira et al, 2021; Oulaich, 2019). Not only can teachers receive feedback throughout a course or presentation, but learners can use helpful brainstorming tools in breakout sessions and receive a full report of their interactions within the Wooclap platform after the session. The integration of Wooclap in a Zoom or Microsoft Teams presentation, as long as meaningfully incorporated, allows for teachers to increase student motivation to actively participate in an online setting.

Why Wooclap?

Wooclap Promotes Self-Regulatory Strategies

The thought of transforming a week-long workshop that leads to the certification of facilitators into an online format is daunting. Active participation is crucial and battling Zoom fatigue is a big obstacle. As Keller & Diemann (2018) highlight, there should be a balance between the participants’ desire to learn more information and their emotional state. It seems that Wooclap could help in the creation of this balance. In a research study in France, students in the medical field responded positively to the use of an ARS during their lectures. The study used qualitative surveys to measure perceived efficacy of three ARS including Wooclap. Overall, students felt that the use of an ARS improved their understanding, ability to memorize, active participation, and encouraged their course attendance overall (Grzych & Schraen-Maschke, 2019). A case study in a university level Business Ethics course in Portugal reported similar findings. Students noted that the use of Wooclap helped them to feel more involved in the class, more connected to the other students, and that it increased their attention to the content presented (Oliveira et al 2021). Without the use of Wooclap, these same students might have found themselves distracted throughout their large online courses and disconnected from the other students and their teacher.

Wooclap Helps Cultivate Curiosity

Curiosity is often noted in research as a key factor in the learning process. Throughout their learning journey, students are figuring out how to learn and what makes them interested in learning (Barker & Holden, 2017; Goodwin, 2019; Zion & Sadeh, 2007). Teachers play a pivotal role in helping students spark their curiosity and discovering how to approach new concepts. However, as Goodwin (2019) outlines, many teachers often do the opposite by focusing on outdated learning strategies and what students might perceive to be boring classroom activities. These same teachers might also discourage questions, especially if they are outside the scope of the lesson which can lead to a decrease in curiosity (Barker & Holden, 2017). Wooclap allows facilitators to conduct different types of pre-assessments which can offer multiple benefits. First, they can see what their students already know and can adapt their explanations on the students’ prior knowledge (Oulaich, 2019). Second, teachers are able to gauge their students’ interests and can therefore guide the discussions accordingly (Barker & Holden, 2017). Finally, this approach sets the expectation for student involvement throughout and reminds students that the learning is personal. When students are involved in their own learning process, the motivation is likely to be intrinsic which often leads to increased curiosity and more positive learning outcomes (Fryer et al 2014, Goodwin, 2019). While teachers can use moments throughout their Wooclap presentation to assess learning and inform their progress, students can also ask direct questions through Wooclap which the teacher can answer in the moment or save for later. The platform encourages questions, which Barker & Holden (2017) indicate is crucial in order to foster curiosity in students of all ages.

Wooclap Establishes Positive Expectancies for Success

Attending lengthy online workshops without enhanced interaction can make students feel dejected and increase feelings of failure and lack of control over the situation. Wooclap uniquely combats this feeling by providing students with more agency within the course or workshop. The Wooclap video posted on the website and above mentions student cell phones as a commonly prohibited classroom item. However, with Wooclap, they become an integral part of the learning process which can combat the feeling that teachers are the oppressors and have no interest in making learning fun (Filippello et al, 2020; Goodwin, 2019). A study in a Sicilian secondary school showed that learned helplessness increases when teachers are perceived to be the sole control in a classroom and the classroom lacks autonomy support. On the contrary, when students felt autonomy and confidence in their own abilities, their intrinsic motivation increased along with academic achievement (Filippello et al, 2020). Another study completed in a Scottish secondary school discovered that a student’s individual perception in terms of academic achievement seems to be more important than the view of the teacher (Banks & Woolfson, 2008). Therefore, teachers should consider ways to bolster student confidence in their own performance. This research is encouraging concerning Wooclap, since Wooclap enhances individual participation while offering the support of the teacher as needed. With a constant feedback loop present through the teacher’s ability to provide comprehension checks and open communication with questions, students are connected to the coursework and feel confident in both themselves and their mastery of the content (Korpi, 2019).

Conclusion

As we use Wooclap to transition our workshops from an in-person only model to a format that functions well as both an online and hybrid solution, we will need to be mindful about how we incorporate it. Grzych & Schraen-Maschke (2019) mention some important considerations when using audience response systems, such as the novelty effect. Engagement could somewhat be attributed to the fact that students are just beginning to see the integration of an audience response systems in their courses. The efficacy might begin to decrease as the novelty effect wears off. We will also need to vary the types of interactions and carefully consider when to use them throughout the workshops. The current research indicates that fewer participants responded to the prompts as class continued (Grzych & Schraen-Maschke, 2019). Finally, I think it will be interesting to collect some qualitative and quantitative data on the efficacy of Wooclap in this type of workshop. Most of the current data available are from secondary and university level students and the long-term effects have not yet been studied.

Learn more about what Wooclap has to offer here.

References

Banks, M. & Woolfson, L. (2008). Why do students think they fail? The relationship between attributions and academic self-perceptions. British Journal of Special Education, 35(1), 49–56. https://doi-org.oclc.fullsail.edu/10.1111/j.1467-8578.2008.00369.x

Barker, K. & Holden, P. (2017). Let it go: The power of student-generated questioning in inquiry learning. Knowledge Quest, 46(2), 36–41.

Filippello, P., Buzzai, C., Costa, S., Orecchio, S., & Sorrenti, L. (2020). Teaching style and academic achievement: The mediating role of learned helplessness and mastery orientation. Psychology in the Schools, 57(1), 5–16. https://doi-org.oclc.fullsail.edu/10.1002/pits.22315

Fryer, L. K., Ginns, P., & Walker, R. (2014). Between students’ instrumental goals and how they learn: Goal content is the gap to mind. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 84(4), 612–630. https://doi-org.oclc.fullsail.edu/10.1111/bjep.12052

Goodwin, B. (2019). Cultivating curiosity in teens: How can we flip the switch for disengaged teen learners? Educational Leadership, 76(8), 80–81.

Grzych, G. & Schraen-Maschke, S. (2019) Interactive pedagogic tools: evaluation of three assessment systems in medical education. Annales de Biologie Clinique. 77(4):429-435. doi:10.1684/abc.2019.1464

Keller, J.M. & Deimann, M. (2018). Motivation, volition, and performance. In R.A. Reiser, & J.V Dempsey (Eds.), Trends and issues in instructional design and technology (4th ed.) (pp. 78-86). New York, NY: Pearson

Korpi, S. (2019). Portfolio Project as Summative Language Assessment: Engaging Learners Online. International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education, 34(2), 1–18. http://www.ijede.ca/index.php/jde/article/view/1110

Oliveira, L., de Oliveira, A.J., Mesquita, A., & Sa Sequira, A. (2021) Activating student engagement in large videoconferencing classrooms with audience response systems during confinement. Research Gate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351664427_Activating_student_engagement_in_large_videoconferencing_classrooms_with_audience_response_systems_during_confinement

Oulaich, S. (2019). Pedagogy in the digital age. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Smart City Applications. (74), 1-9

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368756.3369058

Zion, M. & Sadeh, I. (2007). Curiosity and open inquiry learning. Journal of Biological Education (Society of Biology), 41(4), 162–168. https://doi-org.oclc.fullsail.edu/10.1080/00219266.2007.9656092