Surveys in Zoom

Surveys in Zoom

Activating students is a particular challenge in online courses. Often, teachers are confronted with a large number of dark (and partly) anonymous windows of viewers. The usual view into the auditorium, which transports any question marks into the consciousness of the lecturer and enables him/her to spontaneously make facts more comprehensible, is no longer available. It is therefore all the more important to receive comprehension feedback from the students during the lecture.

At TUHH, Zoom has proven itself as a tool for lectures. Here, for example, you can get feedback through a lively chat parallel to the lecture. However, it is difficult to keep an eye on the lecture and the chat at the same time. Another possibility is voting systems (e.g. Turningpoint, Pingo, Mentimeter). Zoom (with licence) has also integrated a poll function, which is already being used by some lecturers at TUHH.

Dr Christin Burkhardt (Institute of Technical Microbiology) comments:

“The survey tool in Zoom is a good way to interact with students during online lectures and exercises. The students can be activated by the lecturer through technical questions and participate in simple polls. Even with organisational questions, you (and the students) quickly get an overview of the answers.

In my opinion, the main advantage of Zoom surveys over other online tools is the low participation hurdle for students. This means that students can submit their answers directly by clicking on their screen. Logging in, as with other external survey tools, or installing an app are therefore not necessary. Spontaneous surveys, however, are not so easy to implement; it is best to deposit the questions in advance for the planned meeting at Zoom. Once you have activated the survey tool in your account, however, it is very simple and straightforward. In addition to single-choice, multiple-choice questions are also possible, which can be selected and activated in the taskbar during the meeting. All in all, it is a very easy-to-use survey tool during online lectures – both for students and lecturers.”

Due to the number of students voting, the lecturer also knows immediately how many audience members are actually actively following. It should be noted that the function only works in scheduled meetings and not in instant meetings. Also, co-hosts cannot participate in Zoom polls. This can be relevant when using breakout rooms (when assigning students the status of co-host to avoid time-consuming manual assignment in breakout rooms). Zoom provides detailed instructions on how to create surveys here.

Tip: If you want to avoid the effort of entering all questions in Zoom, you can also resort to displaying the question and answer options on the PowerPoint slide. The Zoom survey can then simply be reduced to the letters for selection, for example. In this way, it is sufficient to create a generally valid survey that can be activated again and again.

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