Clickable Image Questions

Way back in 2009, my first book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments, was published. At the time, teaching with a classroom response system meant teaching with "clickers," small handheld devices that students could use to respond to multiple-choice questions posed by the instructor during class. The very first clicker systems were actually wired, but those soon gave way to infrared systems (working like a TV remote so that students had to aim at a receiver) and then radio frequency systems (removing the need to aim). Although some clicker models allowed alphanumeric text responses, the vast majority were limited to multiple-choice questions. One could do a lot of teaching with a multiple-choice questions, however, which is how I could write a whole book on teaching with this simple technology.

Sidebar: Do you see the clicker on the cover of my book here? No one ever notices it, but there's a stylized clicker on the left side of the cover. It's one of my favorite things about the book.

Were I to write a second edition of that 2009 book, I would have a lot of updating to do. That's chiefly because current classroom response systems leverage student phones and laptops, which means systems aren't limited to multiple-choice questions. One of my favorite types of polling questions is the clickable image question. With this question type, an instructor loads an image of some kind into the system, then invites their students to click anywhere on the image. The system then visualizes those clicks in some way, either by showing a bunch of virtual pins on the image, one for each click, or through a heatmap, where color is used to indicate frequency of response.

Clickable image questions have been around for a while, at least since 2009 when University of Michigan professor Perry Samson build them into the LectureTools response system he developed. I blogged about this at the time, attempting (and failing) to coin the term "placemark question" for this type of polling question. (I thought it was a clever name, after the name of those pins you'll see on Google Maps, but it never took off.) Perry was a professor of atmospheric, ocean, and space sciences at the time, and he would show his students a weather map and ask them to predict where it would rain. From a Campus Technology article on Perry's system:

I've been thinking about clickable image questions lately because they've come up in two recent podcast interviews. In Episode 34 of Intentional Teaching, I talked with Sravanti Kantheti, program director for anatomy and physiology at Lanier Technical College, about her use of Top Hat's "Ace" AI-powered learning assistant. That meant talking about her use of Top Hat, which has a variety of classroom response tools, including clickable image questions. (Top Hat calls them "click on target" questions.) Sravanti uses these questions in her anatomy and physiology courses, and she shared a favorite with me. She'll show her students a diagram of a human heart and ask them, "Where in the heart would you find deoxygenated blood?" The resulting heatmap gives her a lot of information about her students' understanding of heart anatomy and blood flow.

Earlier this week I interviewed Stephen Sansom, Todd Clary, and Carolyn Aslan, who authored a paper in the journal Classical World titled "Active Learning Techniques to Enhance Conceptual Learning in Greek Mythology." Todd and Stephen redesigned Cornell University's Greek myths course, a popular course in classics departments everywhere, to incorporate less traditional lecture and more active learning. This was done as part of Cornell's Active Learning Initiative, which Carolyn helps direct. (That initiative has been around for a decade now! Can you believe that?) Todd and Stephen leaned heavily into polling for the course using Poll Everywhere, another classroom response system. In the paper, they share a common use of clickable image questions in the course, in which they present students with several lines from the reading (e.g. Illiad 5.692-98) and ask them to click on the word or phrase that is most unexpected.

I love both of these examples of clickable image questions in action. Sravanti's question has correct and incorrect answers, while the Cornell team's question doesn't. However, both questions provide useful formative assessment and both questions inform the resulting class discussion about the topics at hand. Stay tuned to the Intentional Teaching podcast feed for my interview with the Cornell Greek myths course redesign team. And if you have a favorite clickable image question in your teaching, I'd love to see it and share it here in the newsletter.

Thanks for reading!

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