I have just finished coordinating a month-long (very concentrated) course on the musculoskeletal
system to first year med students (101) in the class. Used an audience response system (Turning
Point). Although I had trialed it successfully in Dec in took me 3 sessions to get it working
properly as I had unexpected software, hardware issues. So my first point is have "plan B"
available. In my case the team folders had coloured "hold up" answer sheets. Once I got it going
it was nice to see the immediate graphs but it was too fiddly to identify the groups easily without
more computer manip than I cared to do with 101 pairs of eyes staring at me and wanting to move
on so you do lose the identifyability of the groups unless they 'fess up. I know that Larry
Michaelson told me that this was a pitfall about the ARS that concerned him. Also, there was
chronically one group who did not submit answers that I eventually figured out to be a hardware
problem. I'm just not sure that I'll use it next time for this. I'm going to use it for a lecture type
review session next month with 50 clickers between 100 students to force some think-pair-share
type exercises and I think that this will be helpful. But after using it for TBL I'm less convinced.
It's certainly not reliable enough (in my hands) to allow grading of TBL. Don't get me wrong, it has
it's place but I'm not sure that the place is within TBL.
Lindsay Davidson
School of Medicine
Queen's University
[log in to unmask]http://meds.queensu.ca/courses/msk/
