I was quoted this morning in “At Universities, Is Better Learning a Click Away?“, an Associated Press story on the future of classroom response systems by AP reporter Eric Gorski.  The story features Michael Dubson, who teaches physics with clickers at the University of Colorado-Boulder.  CU-Boulder, and its physics education research group in particular, has been very active in the world of clickers (including contributing to these great videos), and I was glad to hear Michael Dubson’s perspectives on the technology in the AP piece.

CU-Boulder is an i>clicker campus, and Dubson makes the case in the AP story that a simple, dedicated clicker device is preferable in most instances to more flexible systems based on smart phone apps.  Indeed, i>clicker devices have only six buttons–an on/off button and buttons labeled A, B, C, D, and E.  This is a very simple system, but, as inventor Tim Stelzer argued at the Louisville clicker conference back in 2008, multiple-choice questions with five answer choices work very well for the kinds of formative assessment and peer instruction many instructors use clickers to implement.

Gorski places me on the other side of a somewhat-artificial divide:

Derek Bruff, assistant director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching, said simple clickers are great at multiple choice questions. But he’s more excited about using smart phones, which allow students to ask questions of instructors, hold back-channel discussions with each other and respond in their own words.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m definitely excited by the possibilities of using smart phones as “super-clickers” or to facilitate backchannel discussion in the classroom.  It’s true that I’m more excited by smart-phone systems than I am by simple clickers like i>clicker, but that’s largely because I’ve been involved in teaching with clicker with several years and I’m eager to leverage that experience to consider new kinds of technology-facilitated classroom dynamics.  (For one thoughtful perspective on those potential dynamics, consider Sean Seepersad’s recent post on moving away from clickers.  I hope to blog about Sean’s post soon!)

I’ve spent plenty of time thinking about the pedagogy of multiple-choice questions (while writing my book, blogging about clickers here, and giving talks on the subject around the country), and I think the multiple-choice format is often underrated.  I even have an article coming out (soon, I hope!) titled, “Multiple-Choice Questions You Wouldn’t Put on a Test: Promoting Deep Learning with Clickers.”  So I definitely get where Michael Dubson is coming from: Five-answer multiple-choice clicker questions are incredibly useful in all kinds of courses.

All this to say that one of the principles I attempted to uphold when writing my book was that everyone’s teaching context is different–different students, different disciplines, different institutions, different teaching styles and experiences.  I’m interested in helping instructors think more intentionally about their teaching choices, exploring the pros and cons of choices both traditional and innovative.  So while I may be more excited myself about smart phone systems, I always encourage instructors to select technologies and teaching practices that make the most sense in their particular teaching contexts.

I’m glad for clickers to receive the attention of the Associated Press.  The story has been all over Twitter today, and I hope it makes its way into print and online newspapers across the country.  And I’m glad that I could help Eric Gorski out as he was researching this story.  Eric also contributed to a short video piece to accompany his article, and he blogged about the story on the AP’s Facebook page.

Thoughts on the AP story?

Image: “The Nabla System (Forgotten Seed)” by Flickr user Syntopia

Since many instructors interested in learning about teaching with clickers benefit from hearing how colleagues in their own disciplines use clickers, I’ve put together a discipline index for my book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems. By looking up your discipline in the index below, you’ll find concrete examples of teaching with clickers from faculty members whom I interviewed for my book, including in some cases example clicker questions.  I hope you find this useful!

Anthropology, 92-93

Astronomy, 16, 21, 49, 94, 118, 148, 158, 204

Biological Sciences, 10-11, 33, 66, 114, 124-125, 147, 187, 198

Chemistry, 21, 27-29, 52, 54-55, 73, 79-80, 84, 90, 104-105, 113, 114, 115-116, 118, 127, 129, 132, 147, 148, 157, 201

Communication Studies, 6-8

Earth & Environmental Sciences, 40-41, 44-45, 118, 129-130, 136, 187, 201-202, 204

Economics, 35, 112

Engineering, 52, 68, 120

English, 67, 84, 86-88, 198

Health Sciences, 41, 63-64, 73, 86, 101-102, 109-110, 129, 139, 163, 197, 201

History, 67-68, 76, 95-96, 99, 140, 198-199

Human & Organizational Development, 47, 67, 100-101, 109, 198

Language Instruction, 11-13, 17-18, 69-70, 203

Law, 80-81, 99-100, 160, 200, 203

Library Science, 82-83, 95

Mathematics, 1-3, 24, 36, 75-76, 83, 84-86, 108, 111-112, 115, 118, 120, 129-130, 133, 158

Nursing, 147

Pharmacy, 91-92

Philosophy, 22, 45-46, 81-82, 92, 119, 127, 137, 141, 148, 202

Physics, 15, 17, 61-62, 78-79, 118, 122-123, 125

Political Science, 42, 159, 199

Psychology, 21, 23, 25, 30-31, 35, 44, 89, 97, 110-111, 115, 116-117, 129-130, 139, 140, 149, 189-191, 198, 200

Sociology, 107

Veterinary Medicine, 18-20, 79, 190-191

Classroom assessment techniques (CATs) are simple, non-graded, usually anonymous, in-class activities designed to give you and your students useful feedback on the teaching-learning process as it is happening.  The standard reference on CATs is Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers by Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross (Jossey-Bass, 1993). This book includes 50 CATs, each described in detail with examples from a variety of disciplines.  You’ve probably heard of a few of these, such as the minute paper, muddiest point exercise, and background knowledge probe.

CATs provide what is known as formative assessment, something I’ve frequently blogged about.  This is assessment of student learning intended to inform future teaching.  Formative assessment is often contrasted with summative assessment, which is performed in order to evaluate student performance.  Summative assessment comes at the end of a learning experience; formative assessment happens as the students are learning.  Feedback from formative assessment can provide instructors with useful insight into what students are understanding, what they are not understanding, and how they might target their teaching to their particular students.

At the recent EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative conference, Charlotte Briggs (University of Illinois-Chicago) and Deborah Keyek-Franssen (University of Colorado-Boulder) presented the results of a very useful study.  They combed through all 50 CATs in the Angelo and Cross book and determined that 23 of them could be used with clickers.  I’ve long thought of classroom response systems as a sort of “technoCAT,” a technology-enhanced classroom assessment technique, since they provide such useful formative assessment of student learning.  Charlotte and I connected via Twitter some time ago, and she had let me know that this analysis of the Angelo and Cross book was in the works.  I was very excited to see her work presented at the ELI meeting!

Charlotte and Deborah’s PowerPoint slides are available, as is their handout listing all 23 CATs that can be performed with clickers.  In their slides, they provide the following example of a CAT that can be used “as is” with clickers.

Background Knowledge Probe: Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of Romanticism?

1. Attention to “the natural”
2. Valued “folk” literature, such as fairy tales
3. Had a strong geographical center in Düsseldorf
4. Referred to “the blue flower” as a central symbol for longing
5. Valued medieval literature and art.

You can imagine asking this kind of clicker question at the start of a unit on Romanticism–or a unit that referenced Romanticism but didn’t focus on it.  If knowledge of Romanticism is important for participating in the discussion that followed, then this question will let instructors know how much time they need to spend reviewing Romanticism at the start of the unit.

The background knowledge probe CAT is one that I referenced in my book since it’s such a common use of clickers.  Where Charlotte and Deborah’s work gets more interesting is in their analysis of the other 49 CATs in the Angelo and Cross book!  For instance, they identify 12 other CATs that can be used “as is” with clickers, including such CATs as approximate analogies, problem recognition tasks, self-confidence surveys, and goal ranking and matching.  They also identify 10 CATs that can be modified to work with clickers.

For example, Angelo and Cross describe the “one sentence summary” CAT, in which students are asked to write a one-sentence summary of a reading or lecture using the WDWWWWHW format: Who Does What to Whom When Where How and Why.  Charlotte and Deborah note that students aren’t able to construct and submit these sentences using clickers.  However, they can be given a potential one-sentence summary and asked to identify its flaws.  The example they share in their slides is this one:

One-Sentence Summary: Find the errors in WDWWWWHW: A grand jury is a panel of judges (who) that decides if someone should be charged with a crime (does what to whom) when the offense might be a felony carrying prison time (when) if federal courts and most state courts (where) by listening to arguments by attorneys from both sides (how) so common sense and community perspectives are part of the criminal justice system (why).

1. Who and Why
2. When and Where
3. How and Why
4. Who and How
5. Does What to Whom and How

This clicker serves much the same purpose as a “traditional” one-sentence summary, in part because it’s a “multiple mark” style of question, asking students to identify not one, but two things wrong with the given summary.  If your clicker system allows actual multiple-mark questions, allowing students to select as many incorrect elements as they wish, the question becomes even more complex–and thus closer in usage to the one-sentence summary described by Angelo and Cross.

Charlotte and Deborah make a few very good points about modifying CATs to work with clickers.  They note that doing so “tends to down-grade the complexity” of the CAT itself.  With the one-sentence summary, for instance, you lose the ability to see what surprising things students might say in their constructed sentences.  However, Charlotte and Deborah point out that class discussion of the clicker question can restore that complexity.  As they write, “Instructors often get the most out of clickers when they are used to prompt discussion,” which is a point I always make when I talk about teaching with clickers.

Here’s one more great example along those lines.  Instead of asking students to write down the “muddiest point” of a lecture at the end of class, Charlotte and Deborah suggest in their handout the following:

List potential topics on slide and include an “other” option. Ask students to indicate the topic with which they had the most difficulty. If a significant proportion of the class selects “other”, probe the class to identify other “muddy” issues.

For other ideas on adapting CATs for use with clickers, take a look at their handout.  The Angelo and Cross CATs book is well-known in some educational circles (not so much in others, unfortunately), and Charlotte and Deborah’s work serves as a nice introduction to teaching with clickers for those familiar with the book.  Conversely, those already teaching with clickers are likely to find a few new ideas for using them as they explore the CATs framework.

Have you seen the new product (in beta) from Microsoft called Mouse Mischief?  I heard about it on Twitter a few weeks ago.  It’s an add-on to PowerPoint aimed squarely at the K12 market, but it’s of potential interest to those in higher education looking for alternatives to clickers.

To use Mouse Mischief as a classroom response system, a teacher embeds a special multiple-choice question slide in her PowerPoint presentation.  Each student in the classroom needs a mouse connected (wirelessly, no doubt) to the teacher’s computer.  When the question slide is shared with the class, each student sees a unique mouse cursor on the big screen.  They manipulate these cursors with their mice, using them to click on their answers to the question at hand.  The program then provides a bar chart showing the distribution of student responses.

I hear a lot about clicker alternatives that involve student cell phones or smart phones or laptops, but this is the first tool I’ve seen that uses mice as student input devices.  That’s a clever idea, but it has a very significant flaw.  Since the students can see their peers’ mouse cursors on the screen as they answer, students can’t answer independently!  This means that you’ll see the same lemming effect you see with hand-raising.  Once students start to figure out which cursors belong to the “smart kids,” they’ll just wait for those kids to answer and copy them.

Given this very significant flaw, I can’t really see how this tool would be useful.  It’s better than a show of hands, I guess, since it records student responses, allowing teachers to hold students accountable for their class participation.  That’s a good thing.  But the lack of independent responses is a real deal-breaker in my view.  What are your thoughts on Microsoft Mouse Mischief?

Although relatively few instructors in the humanities use clickers, if there’s one discipline in the humanities where clickers are starting to get some traction, it would be philosophy. I interviewed a couple of philosophy faculty members for my book (including Ron McClamrock of SUNY-Albany), and I’ve recently found a few online resources for using clickers in philosophy, listed below.

Why the particular interest in clickers among philosophy instructors? Perhaps it’s because some teach courses in logic, and these courses are often more like math courses (where clickers are more mainstream) than typical humanities courses. Perhaps it’s because some philosophy instructors teach relatively large classes–larger than is typical in English and language instruction, certainly–and clickers excel in large classes. However, I suspect the primary reason clickers have been adopted in philosophy is because philosophy instructors like to ask what I call “student perspective questions” in my book. These opinion and experience questions work beautifully in ethics courses, and I imagine they work well in other philosophy courses, as well.

On the Teaching Philosophy 101 site, John Immerwahr provides an introduction to teaching with clickers in philosophy courses.  He suggests a few uses of clickers that are of particular use in teaching philosophy.  For instance, he suggests asking students a few opinion questions at the beginning of a unit to surface their perspectives on the topic, helping them have a great stake in the discussion that follows.  He also suggests asking the same questions before and after a topic is discussed as a way to show students that “serious discussion of issues actually matters to how people think (a point which they sometimes don’t get initially).”

Immerwahr also stresses a point about clickers that is sometimes subtle: They can be used to generate “meta-conversations,” as he calls them.

Interestingly, the wording of the questions themselves often creates prompts for discussion. Student like to discuss why the class voted as it did, and people will sometimes make interesting distinctions (e.g., a student might say “If the question has said ‘can’ make a difference instead of ‘will’ make a difference, I would have voted differently,” which can then lead into another interesting discussion).

In my talks on teaching with clickers, I’ll often mention that the results display itself can generate useful discussion.  Asking students why the class voted as it did can often lead to productive discussions of assumptions students make about themselves and each other.

Immerwahr’s example also reminds me of another point I often make, that the wording on clicker questions need not be as precise as the wording on exam questions.  One reason is that if the question isn’t worded exactly right, an instructor can still make it work during the discussion of the question.  Another is that clicker questions can be modified and asked again based on student comments during discussion.  In Immerwahr’s example, for instance, the instructor could easily change “will” to “can” in the question and re-poll the students.

For an expanded version of Immerwahr’s introduction to clickers, read his Teaching Philosophy article, “Engaging the ‘Thumb Generation’ with Clickers.”  The article includes more discussion of the clicker uses mentioned above, as well as other uses, and features several sample questions.

And for even more resources on using clickers in philosophy instruction, visit the Peer Instruction in the Humanities project out of Monash University in Australia.  This site features a step-by-step guide to PI, advice on designing a PI lecture, a description of a sample PI lecture, examples of various types of clicker questions appropriate for this teaching context, and even a question bank organized by topic!  I’m very glad to know that there’s a humanities clicker question bank out there to complement existing question banks in the sciences.

Last week I facilitated a workshop titled “Engaging Students in Large Lecture Courses” for the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University.  Since many of those interested in teaching with clickers teach large lecture courses, I thought my blog readers might be interested in some of the resources from the workshop.

First, here’s a PowerPoint presentation on the basics of good lecturing I shared with the workshop participants ahead of time via Slideshare:

Next, here are the visuals I used during the workshop itself:

This was my first time using Prezi, and I found it to be an interesting alternative to PowerPoint.  The ability to arrange content spatially and at different resolutions was particularly helpful as I planned the workshop.  During the workshop, I mostly followed a planned path through the presentation–the one you can follow by clicking repeatedly on the “next” arrow above.  However, on a couple of occasions, questions were asked that prompted me to go off-path and zoom around the Prezi.  That ability is particularly valuable for responding to one’s audience.

My other experiment during the workshop was the use of Google Moderator as a backchannel tool.  Moderator allows users to submit questions to a presenter, but also to view other users’ questions and vote them up or down.  Prior to the workshop, I emailed the registered participants and invited them to submit questions about the workshop topic via Moderator.    During the last 15 minutes of the workshop, I asked the participants to open their laptops (or turn on their smart phones), log in to Moderator, submit additional questions, and vote on their peers’ questions.  This very quickly generated a nice list of questions, ranked in order of importance by the voting mechanism.  I then spent the remaining time in the workshop addressing the most important questions.

Having a room full of participants quietly tapping away on their mobile devices was a little too disconcerting for me, so, following Monica Rankin’s lead, I had the participants brainstorm questions in pairs, then submit them via Moderator.  This led to a nice buzz of discussion during the backchannel time and allowed me to wander the room and eavesdrop on the conversations, as I like to do during small group work.

I’ve blogged about other ways to implement backchannel in the classroom, so it was great to get some firsthand experience using Google Moderator for backchannel.  Moderator isn’t the most flexible tool available (there’s no way for a student to comment on another student’s question and the sorting algorithm isn’t entirely intuitive), but it’s simple and easy to use.  I also like that Moderator allows the presenter to comment on questions that have been submitted, which would allow me to address some of less popular questions not addressed during the workshop.  I find that many faculty (and students for that matter) are wary of Twitter, so Moderator might offer an accessible way for instructors to get started with backchannel.

Finally, I posted links to resources relevant to the engagement techniques I highlighted in the workshop (and in the Prezi above).   So if you’re interested in improving your physical presence in the classroom, using better visuals to complement your verbal presentation, or exploring ways to add interactive elements to your lectures, visit the online “home base” for the workshop.

A math colleague of mine, who blogs under the name Doc Turtle, recently blogged about his use of a calculus worksheet that helps his students “guide themselves through the algebraically intense process of partial fractions.”  Doc Turtle reports that his students look forward to this kind of work, and he’s planning to develop more activities along these lines.

I’ve heard from several instructors who have students engage in this kind of active, self-directed learning in class (through worksheets, clicker questions, and so on) that some students complain that the professor isn’t doing any work.  I suspect that these are the students who expect to come to class, take a lot of notes, and figure the material out while working through their homework.  They can sometimes push back when their instructor isn’t presenting course content in the way they expect.

Of course, instructors who design and implement activities like Doc Turtle’s worksheet activity aren’t avoiding the hard work of teaching.  Instead, they’re being intentional about what they want their students to learn and they’re planning and facilitating experiences designed to help their students learn those things.

As Ian Beatty wrote over on his blog, “It’s not really creating [clicker] questions that’s tough.  The hard part is figuring out what I want my students to learn from the class, and casting that in terms of what I want my students to be able to do.”  Once he’s done that, he says it’s relatively easy for him to write effective clicker questions.  “Just formulate a question asking them to do that (in a particular context), and then much of the class activity is me helping them struggle through the process as they learn how.”

What struck me about Doc Turtle’s post was how excited his students are to engage in this kind of active learning.  As I mentioned above, not all students see this kind of learning as valuable.  Did Doc Turtle just get lucky with a batch of exceptional students?  I suspect not.  I’m guessing that he’s been teaching his students to learn this way since the first day of classes so that by this point in the semester, his students are perfectly willing to see this kind of activity as valuable.  I think that’s an important takeaway: If we’re asking our students to learn in a “new” way, then we need to help them learn how to learn in that way.

Do you find that your students push back when you ask them to engage in active learning in class?  How do you help them see the value in this kind of learning over time?

I received an email today from a colleague asking me if I knew of any “clever, low-hassle” methods for catching a student cheating with clickers.  In a large class (say, 100-300 students), one student might bring his friend’s clicker to class and respond to your clicker questions using both clickers, making it appear as if the absent student is present.  This is an issue if you use clickers to take attendance.  It’s a bigger issue if you use clickers for graded quizzes.

My colleague was asking the question in the context of a team-based learning (TBL) course in which students take quizzes first on their own, then in teams.  Their individual and team quiz grades are averaged (using some weighting) to contribute a good portion of their overall course grade.  In this context, clicker cheaters are a big problem.

Here’s what I wrote to my colleague.  I invite your thoughts and “clever, low-hassle” ideas on catching clicker cheaters in the comments below!

Some clicker systems have a “pick a random student” feature that selects one student at random from those that just voted on a question. If your system has this feature, then you can use it every now and then to “cold call” a student. (”Okay, the system has picked Jason Smith. Jason, what was your answer to this question and why did you select it?”) If the system picks a student who isn’t in the room, then you’ve caught a cheater. And the threat alone of being caught this way might do the trick.

This method assumes that Jason’s friend Nick doesn’t answer your cold call, pretending to be Jason. However, that’s a much more egregious instance of cheating than simply bringing Jason’s clicker to class and voting for him.

Of course, if your clicker system doesn’t have the “pick a random student” feature, then you’ll have to take another approach. I usually answer this question by saying that this is a classroom management issue, not a technological issue. When you’re not able to spot clicker cheaters yourself, you might enlist TAs to sit around the room and spot them. You can also make clear to students that this kind of cheating isn’t allowed. A warning might reduce this kind of cheating, but probably won’t eliminate it. Some schools have included statements about clicker cheating in their honor codes, which helps, since that usually means the punishment for getting caught is greater, which deters cheating.

I often recommend that instructors worried about cheating use low-stakes clicker questions so that even if some cheating happens, it won’t give students a significant advantage. Grading on effort, not accuracy of answers, is one way to do this, as is making the clicker quiz grades a relatively small component of students’ overall class grades.

In a TBL context, however, the individual student quizzes are relatively high stakes, right? One of the components of TBL is that students earn some of their points on individual quizzes and some on team quizzes. If the individual quizzes don’t count for much, the pedagogy doesn’t work the same.

Here’s an idea that might work. What if you asked the following clicker question: “What’s the last digit of your social security number?” Assuming you have a record of each student’s social security number, you could check the clicker responses to your records. If Nick brought Jason’s clicker to class and if Nick doesn’t know Jason’s social security number (a safe assumption), then there’s a 90% chance he’ll answer this question incorrectly. That will flag Jason as a cheater. It won’t flag Nick as a cheater, but perhaps you can get Jason to turn on his conspirator. That works on Law & Order all the time.

What do you think? Might this work? And if social security numbers wouldn’t work in your context, perhaps there’s some other student ID number you could use.

So, readers, what do you think of this idea?  Do you have other ideas for catching clicker cheaters?

I wanted to share a couple of reviews my book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems, has received in the year since it’s been available.  There may be other reviews, but these are the two that I’ve seen.

In the Winter 2010 issue of The Review of Higher Education, Jane Freed of Central College and co-author of Learned-Centered Assessment on College Campuses, reviewed the book.  Here’s a brief excerpt:

Bruff convinces me that there are several advantages in using this technology… If the focus of classroom response systems remains on creating active learning environments, then Derek Bruff’s book adds to the on-going conversation about engaging students in their own learning.

Freed also raises an interesting concern: Does teaching with clickers place too much focus on finding the right answers and not enough on focus on helping students learn to ask useful questions?  She writes, “Learning how to navigate successfully through life is often based on knowing what questions to ask.”

This is a valid concern.  In most instances of teaching with clickers, the instructor is the one posing the questions, not the students.  Although, as I mentioned last week, some instructors ask their students to write clicker questions.  Freed’s concern reminds me of a limitation of teaching with clickers I’ve noted before, that they don’t allow instructors to target the “create” category in Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives.

My response to both concerns is that often a clicker question isn’t the end of a learning activity, it is the beginning.  After you ask a challenging clicker question and have students think about and submit their answers, you’ve set the stage for a very productive classwide discussion of that question, a discussion that can surface reasons for and against the various answer choices as well as provide students a forum for asking their own questions about the topic at hand.  This works particularly well when the clicker question has multiple defensible answers, but this kind of exploration and question-asking can occur even when the question at hand has a single correct answer.  It’s important for instructors to remember to engage students in this kind of conversation at least some of the time when asking clicker questions.

In the most recent issue of the journal of the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA), Mark Rohland of Temple University reviewed my book.  Rohland had nice things to say about the book:

This book convincingly demonstrates that clicker technology allows teachers and students to adapt quickly to emerging learning needs…  Bruff’s work is an enthusiastic, accessible, and detailed introduction for all educators interested in this popular educational technology tool.

Since this review appeared in a journal for academic advisers, Rohland points out some potential uses of clickers in group advising sessions, “such as getting student feedback about satisfaction with majors, confidence in understanding curriculum, and perceived need for advising.”  He notes that the anonymity that clickers provide students is likely to yield more honest responses from students about advising issues.

Rohland’s one criticism of my book is that many of my examples of clicker use by faculty members I interviewed illustrate very similar points and that this repetition can be distracting to the reader.  I think this is a fair criticism, particularly if one is reading the book straight through, cover-to-cover.  When I read books on teaching, particularly ones I’ve checked out from a library and not purchased, I often skim through the books, looking for passages relevant to my teaching needs at the time.  When I wrote my book, I wanted to make it helpful for someone who was just skimming it in that fashion, which meant that a little redundancy was acceptable.  I’m also aware that many instructors look for examples from their own discipline, so having a few examples from different disciplines to illustrate the same point helps make the book relevant to more readers.

To that last point, I had intended the book to have a discipline index in addition to a regular index.  When I get some time, I’m hoping to compile such a discipline index and post it here on the blog.  Let me know if that would be useful.

Writing this book, my first one but hopefully not my last one, has been a bit of an adventure.  It’s very satisfying to see positive reviews of my book such as these two.

Eric Tremblay recently blogged about his plans to have his students write clicker questions for him to use during class.  He’s not lazy; he wants his students to think about the material in his course and possible misunderstandings of that material.  Student questions will be posted in a class forum, and he’ll select one or more each week to use in class.  Students earn participation credit for posting questions and triple credit when their questions are the ones selected.

Having students write exam questions as a way of preparing them to take exams is a time-honored teaching strategy, but I have only lately heard of instructors like Eric having students craft clicker questions as a way to have them engage with course material.  Writing clicker questions is difficult, but that’s due in part to the difficulty of predicting student misunderstandings, which is required for constructing good wrong answer choices.  I wonder if students might be better able to identify potential misunderstandings since they are not experts in their fields and are thus closer, in a sense, to those misunderstandings.

This idea of having students write clicker questions came up a few times at the recent Joint Mathematics Meetings I attended.  Have you tried this?  I would be interested in hearing how this plays out.