Readying Lecture Interactivity Technology for the Post-COVID Future

The mental image conjured by the term “classroom interactivity technology” changed significantly in 2020. Products such as student response systems (SRSs) were born two decades ago, but their adoption was never ubiquitous. In 2020, for a while it seemed like the SRS product category had all but become redundant as videoconferencing platforms took over the burden of functions such as class polling. However, it has become increasingly clear that leading videoconferencing platforms themselves have room for improvement when it comes to addressing the differentiated needs of a classroom, as opposed to those of a meeting. A spurt of investment in the education-focused “virtual classroom” space in late 2020 bears testimony to this fact. In this session, we take a closer look at two increasingly relevant questions. First, how can classroom interactivity platforms best serve the needs of both in-person as well as online lectures without requiring an inherently different workflow and duplication of effort? Second, what are the new challenges faculty can expect in 2021 (and indeed beyond), and how can classroom technology help them answer these new questions? As modalities such as hybrid and HyFlex education take over from a purely online scenario, higher education will continue to evolve rapidly, and this session envisions the classroom of the not-so-distant future. We propose solutions that can assist the instructional technology community be battle-ready.