What is an Audience Response System?

BY Editor

Audience Response systems are also known as Student Response systems and have been adopted from military applications to be used in both educational situations and business situations. It has also more recently coined popular usage in various TV game shows that require general audience participation by vote, such as the nationally famous Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

What is it?

More often than not used in presentations, the person in charge of the presentation will use a computer and a video projector, or an overhead projector in order to make a presentation for a group audience to see. At various parts in the presentation the group may be presented with a series of questions that they would need to answer. The group would then use the audience response system, otherwise known as a ‘clicker’ to answer these questions anonymously, which would give the presenter a tally of votes in response to the question posed.

History

Audience Response Systems have been in common use since the 1950’s as a way to get a polled response to questions in classrooms and businesses. Before that, colour-coded cards were used for polls, but with the introduction of Audio Response Systems, this process could be completed anonymously, thereby allowing for far more truthful sets of results.

By 1976, Audience Response Systems became fully digitized with yes and no buttons, and have since been used frequently as an efficient tool used for classroom learning, as well as being used in game shows to include audience participation.

Business Use

As a way to provide accurate findings for various projects, businesses have been using Audience Response Systems for over 50 years. The findings are submitted anonymously, so that the answers given are often far more truthful, and many business changing decisions have been made by using ARS as more employees can give truthful responses in regards to question without fear of penalisation.

More recently online audience response systems have been used for customers and clients of businesses in the form of ‘How did we do/rate our business’ polls, which allows the customer to have a say in the possible future running of the company. Companies and businesses can take positive criticisms and compliments from these online ‘reviews’ and apply them to the company in order to grow and better represent their intended client base.

Classroom Use

Audience Response Systems have been widely used by classrooms for the past few decades as an accurate way of taking attendance, quizzing students, taking a survey and a variety of other methods. The use of the ARS has proven to be effective in group learning, as it provides an alternative to everyday teaching methods and can therefore be more engaging to younger students.

It has also been proved as an effective way to introduce students to a sensitive subject, as students can submit answers anonymously without fear of being singled out for their answer. Students feel they can be more honest with anonymous answers, so sensitive subjects that may otherwise be glossed over could be discussed in more detail.

With the regular introduction of the internet and the use of handheld devices in both business and educational situations, Audience Response Systems will continue to be used successfully as a ways of representing a certain population.

Tessa Sanderson writes for a number of online publications about technology in the workplace and has contributed this post on behalf of CLiKAPAD, suppliers of first rate audience response systems to business users