Higher Education Case Study - Customer Highlight

Ivy Tech Community College - Northeast

CHALLENGE

On July 1st, 2010, Ivy Tech Community College in accordance with its "Achieving the Dream" initiative mandated that all new students go through a New Student Orientation (NSO). As part of the orientation process, pre and post-tests were administered to students to measure learning. With thousands of students scheduled to go through orientation and testing, we looked for ways to make the process as efficient as possible.

The online orientation had a built-in testing feature that allowed us to easily test the students and tabulate results. For in-person sessions we decided to use Scantron sheets that require completion with #2 pencils, but can then be scored using a machine already owned by the college. This standardized testing method seemed to be the best way to minimize human error. The use of this method did require the purchase of specialty sheets and the distribution of sharpened pencils for students.

Minimal inconveniences were experienced during the testing phase; however, real hang-ups were experienced when we went to tabulate the results at the end of the first semester. Results could not be collected after each session and combined, rather hundreds of answer sheets had to be run at once. As a result, several sheets were never scored and we had to settle for incomplete results. The scoring machine prints the individual score on each test and then provides a summary of results, or total number of students that missed each question. While we could measure growth from pre-test to post-test with these results, we had no understanding of how the students were answering the questions. We could only measure whether or not the student answers were correct.

The following semester we attempted to correct the issues that we knew would cause the tests to be rejected during scoring, and although the process improved, we still had error. We discovered the biggest issue when the Office of the President and Institutional Research requested that we provide unit data for each student. For our online orientation this required downloading an Excel sheet and formatting it to show the student ID number, pre-test and post-test scores. For the in-person tests that were not accepted by the scoring machine, we had to manually check and score those sheets to later enter the results and student ID numbers into Excel.

SOLUTION

At this point, Christina Smith, Director of Student Life, Leadership and Development for Ivy Tech Community College − Northeast campus in Fort Wayne, Indiana realized we needed a more effective system that would further reduce the risk of error. Discussion with our resident expert on all technologies, Director of Media Services, Instructional & Online Technologies, A. Andaz Ahmad, led us to pursue the idea of ‘clickers’ for automated scoring and report generating for the in-person orientation sessions. After some research and the review of several clickers solutions, vendor selection process managed by Andaz, chose to purchase the Turning Technologies response systems. Andaz and Christina had an easy time adapting their PowerPoint presentations with the company's TurningPoint polling software that is 100% native to Microsoft PowerPoint.

Since the adoption, Ivy Tech Community College − Northeast has oriented around 200 students in one month and trained ten presenters to use the technology when facilitating orientation. The change has been a huge time-saver because we no longer spend wasted time on tasks such as sharpening pencils, erasing stray pencil marks, or copying answer sheets to try and get the scoring machine to accept cleaner results. Instead we have a case of clickers that we can just grab and go, and we are being eco-friendly since the clickers are not disposable like the pencils and answer sheets.

In addition, the reporting function has made it easier for us to collect the data needed for Institutional Research (without manual entry), and we can more easily see how our students are answering questions to adapt our orientation and better teach the students. TurningPoint also allows us to ask end of chapter questions to emphasize any points students may be struggling with. The software's demographic questions permit us to collect additional data in order to gather student opinions and better understand which students attend in-person sessions versus online sessions.

While we are still new to the technology, we are looking forward to learning additional ways to utilize it. We are extremely satisfied with the results we have witnessed so far. We see this as a great tool that cannot only meet our needs but grow with us as well.