AudienceResponseLearning

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Audience Response Systems

Dr. Will Thalheimer
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What Should We Call These Systems?

Although audience response systems have a long history—going back as far as the 1950’s or 1960’s—it has only been in the last five to ten years that wireless capability has made them widely practical. Unfortunately, the newness of their availability has not enabled the marketplace to settle on a naming convention. There is no dominant brand name like Kleenex, Clorox, Ziploc, or Tupperware. Furthermore, until recently there was no generic label that manufacturers or users could agree on.

However, as I write this in March 2007, it has become clear that the market is rallying around the generic term "audience response system."

David Banks used the term "audience response system" in the title of the book he edited in 2006. The book includes chapters from over 50 researchers, instructors, and learning professionals who have been pioneering the use of these systems. They don’t all use the same terminology, but the book title seems to have accelerated a move toward the term "audience response systems."

In addition, searching Google from among the list of candidate names in March 2007 revealed that the term "audience response system" garnered the most hits by far, almost double its nearest competitor. Moreover, while a similar search four months earlier found the same top rating for "audience response system," the gap seems to be widening. On March 14, 2007, searching Google for "Audience Response System" found 82,300 Web pages; "Classroom Performance System" got 41,800; "Student Response System" got 30,600; "Classroom Response System" got 21,400. As David Banks said in his book, using the most popular search term helps those of us who want to learn more about audience response systems. Here are the results:

Google Search Webpage Hits Mar 2007

Search Term	Mar 2007
"Audience Response System"	82,300
"Classroom Performance System"	41,800
"Student Response System"	30,600
"Classroom Response System"	21,400

Finally, of the 26 vendors I was able to locate (click here to see the list), 14 used the term “audience response systems” to refer in general to the type of product they were offering, three used the term “classroom response systems,” and the rest used various names.

Names—including brand names—that are the most popular in use today:

audience response system
student response system
classroom performance system
personal response system
classroom response system
remote response system
wireless response device
group response system
interactive response system
electronic voting system
classroom communication system
response systems

In addition to the naming of the systems, various names are used for the handsets that learners use to make their responses:

handsets
clickers
zappers
keypads
response pads

I prefer the term "handset" because it offers the greatest flexibility in terms of functionality. As the technology moves toward the future, it will certainly change to go beyond clicks, keys, and simple button pushes. I'm particularly intrigued by the learning potential of LCD screens and text messaging capabilities.

No Perfect Labels

The term “audience response system” has the unfortunate connotation that it might include an analysis of people’s TV-watching habits or other non-learning applications, for example as a method used in creating TV's Nielson ratings.

Alternatives aren’t perfect either. “Classroom response systems” brings with it the connotation of schooling, making it inappropriate for business meetings, conferences, and the like. “Learner response system” is a little better, but again it doesn’t generalize perfectly to business meetings and conferences, and it can also be confused with computer-based learning interactions. Other labels have obvious drawbacks, for example, “electronic voting systems” call to mind the disenfranchisement of voters whose votes were lost using touch-screen computers.

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