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I was at the MIT-Vienna-Conference and they had a pretty nice App-System (Superevent), where Questions to the Speaker could be asked per the Superevent-app, upvoted from others and finally answered by the speaker, all without hand-raising, etc.

I now would like to try to implement that sort of "Guerilla" in my University for Lectures, since the Professors will never agree to use something like this in the near future. Therefore i also don´t have the money to buy a Conference App. Most of them are restricted to 25-75 people in the free plan, but we normally have 150-200 people sitting in a lecture.

So here´s my question: Does anybody know of free solutions of this?

My primal need is: Question to speaker-App for Android and iOS

My wish would be: An own "Help-area" for each lecture, possibility to provide resource-links, up and downvote(Evaluation) of lecture.

I could get my hand around some money by asking the student committee, but most of the conference apps work on a plan per conference, which would be way to expensive for all the lectures in my study.

enthu
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mordondro
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    May I ask why? – gerrit Mar 27 '15 at 19:22
  • What do you mean? – mordondro Mar 27 '15 at 19:27
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    Perhaps this system might work well at a conference. But I do not think it would translate well to a normal lecture class (as I assume the OP is talking about).

    Distracting students en mass by encouraging them to faff about with smartphones, whilst the lecturer carries on talking, sounds like a terrible idea. If it's really interesting or important, you may interrupt the lecture. Otherwise, save it until the end.

     – Moriarty Mar 27 '15 at 19:48
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    i understand what you mean, but that´s actually not the point. In my studies even if students have questions they don´t want to ask them in front of everybody or forget them until the end and for sure not ask something that would start a discussion. They are shy. It´s an austrian thing maybe. Let´s just say, the normal "Are there any questions?" at the end doesn´t work. That´s why it would be nice to have a system, where you can ask questions anonymously. The answering should for sure happen at the end. I was very surprised at the conference how good it worked. – mordondro Mar 27 '15 at 19:54
  • I use TodaysMeet. It's a tweeter-like forum for students to ask questions and I usually follow up online during break or after the lecture. You don't need a Tweeter account to operate it. I do not like having a rating function with your suggested service. The high/low rating can be so conflated and I am not sure about its usefulness. – Penguin_Knight Mar 27 '15 at 19:58
  • Hi! That´s actually not a bad solution! That´s more or less what i was looking for. Unfortunately no App-Version. Since i will have to install about 50 Rooms and get 100-2000 people to use it this can get pretty chaotic. Also no possibility to delete the questions after they have been answered or at a certain date/time after the lecture. but thx! – mordondro Mar 27 '15 at 20:36
  • I now did a "temporary" solution, where i built an app with appery.io, that has a list of all the lectures and when you click on one it opens the corresponding "Todaysmeet" room. I will not answer my questions, since it´s not exactly what i am looking for. – mordondro Mar 28 '15 at 10:51

2 Answers2

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This free guide - the Event App Bible - lists lots of conference/event apps. I believe there are a mixture of free and paid-for systems included. You should look at the "Audience Response Systems" to id apps that offer this type of functionality, and cross reference that against the pricing table. Hopefully you can find something that works for you. (The guide comes from the Event Manager Blog and was updated recently (2015))

Dermot Lally
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If you don't find a proper open source implementation, you could use Twitter with retweet counts as upvotes and hashtags for each course. I've seen it used by conferences as a question suggestion mechanism.

Bill Barth
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  • Problem is, that the people need a twitter account, which is not very common in austria – mordondro Mar 27 '15 at 19:19
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    @mordondro: True, but signing up for an anonymous twitter account isn't any harder than installing a special-purpose app and setting it up for your courses. (They are both easy but take a minute or two and some instructions.) – Anonymous Mathematician Mar 27 '15 at 20:33